Dr Helen Kingstone

Helen Kingstone joined Surrey in September 2019, from a lectureship at the University of Glasgow.

Her research examines how we write the history of our lifetimes. Her book Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: memory, history, fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) explains why narrating the recent past is always challenging, and shows how it was particularly fraught in the nineteenth century. The book brings together Victorian histories and novels to trace how these parallel genres responded to the challenges of contemporary history writing in divergent ways. 

Helen's current monograph project compares two contrasting Victorian approaches to gaining an artificial overview on the present and the scale of modernity: the panorama and the compilation. It begins by examining the 360° panorama paintings used from the French Revolution onwards to represent recent historical events, and traces how panoramic overview was adopted in literary form by historians, novelists and poets. The book’s second half examines Victorian attempts to encapsulate the contemporary era through compilations, from ephemeral collective biographies, to W. T. Stead's digest of periodicals the Review of Reviews, to the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1900), which was surprisingly full of very recent lives.

Her other research interest is in oral history, and in how we build narratives of our lifetimes through memory. She is co-chair of the Wellcome Trust-funded Humanities & Social Sciences research network on 'Generations: what's in the concept and how best should it be used?'. She and sociologist Dr Jennie Bristow (Canterbury Christ Church University) hosted workshops across 2019-20 to pool knowledge across disciplines, and to work out how this important but divisive concept can best be used in public discourse and by policy-makers. Here is our toolkit for 'Talking about Generations: 5 questions to ask yourself'.

Helen and Dr Trev Broughton (University of York) led a collaborative project with other Victorian Studies scholars on the cohort Born in 1819, who were also exact contemporaries of Queen Victoria, and all had bicentenaries in 2019. This project – published as a pair of Roundtables in Journal of Victorian Culture, with a companion exhibition in Glasgow – examined to what extent these contemporaries felt a shared generational identity.