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Dr Helen Williams

Associate Professor

Department: Humanities

Helen Williams is Associate Professor of English Literature, Acting Deputy Director of Cultural Partnerships, and leads the Scholarly Editing and Print Cultures Research Group. 

Helen received her BA from Northumbria University and her MA from Durham University. She then returned to Northumbria, completing a PhD in collaboration with the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall in 2014. She joined the faculty at Northumbria in 2012. 

In collaboration with the Worshipful Company of Stationers, she holds a British Academy Innovation Fellowship entitled 'Communicating Women's Work in the Historical Archive' (2022-2023), exploring the history of eighteenth-century women in the book trades.

Helen Williams

Campus Address

Office: Lipman 024



Helen’s research interests broadly lie in eighteenth-century book history, professional authorship and literary heritage, and she is particularly interested in heritage collaboration. Her publications undertake a feminist recovery of women's work in book production and explore the effects of writers’ relationships with their patrons and publishers on the production of bestselling literary texts.

Helen is the author of Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2021), co-director of Laurence Sterne and Sterneana (Cambridge Digital Library, 2019), and co-editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of John Cleland (2023). 

  • Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
  • Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book, Williams, H. 1 Apr 2021
  • Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Williams, H., Terry, R. 23 Jul 2018
  • Printing, Publishing and Pocketbook Compiling: Ann Fisher’s Hidden Labour in the Newcastle Book Trade, Williams, H. 2022, Print Culture, Agency, and Regionality in the Hand Press Period, Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan
  • Communing with the Fictional Dead: Grave Tourism and the Sentimental Novel, Williams, H. 2021, British Sociability in Enlightenment Europe , Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan
  • Reading Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure against Cleland's life and letters, Terry, R., Williams, H. 1 Apr 2019, In: Eighteenth-Century Life

  • Charlotte Crawshaw Bluestocking in the North: Elizabeth Montagu, Education and the Archive Start Date: 01/10/2023
  • Laura Sadler Laurence Sterne’s Afterlife in France: From the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century Start Date: 01/10/2022
  • Joanne Edwards Women, the Arts and Patronage: The Delavals of Seaton Delaval Hall Start Date: 01/10/2020

  • English Literature PhD June 24 2014
  • English Literature MA June 30 2009


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