Detailed page Dr. Palmer
Senior Lecturer
Floor/Room: 02.55
After gaining her bachelor degree in English in 2006 at Glasgow University, Palmer completed a Master of Arts in Contemporary Approaches to English Studies in 2007 at Goldsmiths, University of London, with a dissertation entitled ‘Logic of Nonsense: Deleuze, Derrida and the implications of deconstructive play’. She completed her doctorate at Goldsmiths in 2012 with a thesis entitled ‘A Manifesto for Nonsense: the Futurist Drive in Deleuze’s Poetics’. She worked as an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London between 2010 and 2015, then between 2015 and 2020 as a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University London, then between 2020 and 2022 as a Senior Scientist at the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics (ATTP) at TU Vienna and at the Chair for Digital Architectonics at ETH Zürich. Between 2014 and 2018 she was part of the Cost Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’ directed by Iris van der Tuin and Felicity Colman, and in 2023 she was an Interdisciplinary Resident at Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia, USA.
Dr. Helen Palmer is a writer from Blackpool, northern England. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2014), an original exploration of Deleuze's dynamic philosophies of space, time and language, bringing Deleuze and futurism together for the first time. Her second monograph Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), examines the concept of defamiliarisation from a contemporary critical perspective, engages with new materialist feminisms and queer theory and demonstrates the importance of a simultaneously creative and critical approach by providing a reimagining of James Joyce’s chapter 'Oxen of the Sun' from Ulysses.
Her debut novel Pleasure Beach (Prototype, 2023), is a reimagining of James Joyce's Ulysses set in the Pleasure Beach amusement park in Blackpool in the 1990s. She is currently working on a book set in the Prater in Vienna, the second of a trilogy of speculative 'amusement park' novels.
The concepts she has written about in recent years – queer defamiliarisation, speculative taxonomies, synaesthesia, hormones, the sea, speculative fabulation and wor(l)ding – all share the common need for new narratives and perceptions. They all require the simultaneous deployment of scientific and technical experimentation with playful use of the imagination in order to think beyond what already exists and fabulate alternative models into being.
BOOKS: novels
Forthcoming Prater
2023 Pleasure Beach (London: Prototype)
BOOKS: philosophy / theory
2020 Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange, New Materialisms book series ed. Rosi Braidotti and Iris van der Tuin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
2014 Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (London and New York: Bloomsbury)
ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLES, LITERARY ARTICLES AND EXHIBITION TEXTS
2025 (forthcoming) ‘Editor’s Introduction’, and ‘Marine Lover, Machine Lover, Endocrine Lover: The Sea that Splashes in the Cave’, The Sea: A Literary-Philosophical Immersion, special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
2023 PLEASURE BEACH: OFFCUTS AND NOTES, La Piccioletta Barca
2023 ‘Our House’, Exhibition Text for Sophie Pölzl, English and German translation, Bildrecht Vienna.
2023 ‘A Queer Reimagining of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Northern England: Helen Palmer on Why She Chose 1990s Blackpool for the Setting of Pleasure Beach’, Literary Hub
2023 ‘The light of which it speaks: creativity, modality, perception’, Mobilizing Creativity, special issue of Minnesota Review ed. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Iris van der Tuin and Nanna Verhoeff
2021 ‘Synaesthesia’, Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research: Vol. 2 No. 2. Fourth Issue.
2020 ‘Speculative Taxonomies’, Philosophy Today, Special Issue on New Materialist Concepts ed. Iris van der Tuin and Adam Nocek
2020 (with Beatriz Revelles) ‘Decomposing Matter: From Literary Critique to Language Creation’, Matter: Journal of New Materialist Critique: Vol. 1 No 1
2019 (with Vikki Chalklin) ‘Bodies ad Absurdum: Queer Clowning as Method’, Feminist New Materialist Practice, Special Issue of MAI Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, ed. Rebecca Coleman, Tara Page and Helen Palmer
2018 (with Jessica Foley, Vicky Hunter and Karolina Kucia) ‘Situated Knowledge, Transmissions of Practice and Parasitic Endeavours, Ruukku: Studies in Artistic Research No. 9 Special Issue Aesthetic Intra-Actions, ed. Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Milla Tiainen, Tero Nauha and Marie-Luise Angerer
2016 ‘Rewritings / Refoldings / Refleshings’, Sexuality, Culture and Creativity: Commodification and Contemporary Publics: Themed Edition of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies ed. Anne Harris and Yvette Taylor (Taylor & Francis)
2016 (with Anna Hickey-Moody and Esther Sayers) ‘Diffractive Pedagogies: Dancing Across New Materialist Imaginaries’, Shifting Education’s Philosophical Imaginaries: Relations, Affects, Bodies, Materialities, Special Issue of Gender and Education. ed. Aislinn O’Donnell, Sharon Todd and Rachel Jones (Taylor & Francis)
2011 ‘Dynamic Nonsense: Deleuze, Futurism and Linguistic Materiality’, glits-e 2 (2010), peer-reviewed electronic journal of literary and cultural criticism
JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES (EDITOR)
2025 (forthcoming) The Sea: A Literary-Philosophical Immersion. Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (Taylor & Francis)
2019 (with Rebecca Coleman and Tara Page) Feminist New Materialist Practice: The Mattering of Method, Special Issue of MAI Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture
BOOK CHAPTERS
2022 ‘Defamiliarisation’, in More Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti, Emily Jones and Goda Klumbyte (London/NY/Sydney: Bloomsbury)
2020 ‘Sensorium’, ‘Scales as Spectra’, and ‘Sirens and Organs’, Architecture and Naturing Affairs ed. Mihye An and Ludger Hovestadt (Birkhaüser)
2019 ‘A Field of Heteronyms: New Materialism, Speculative Fabulation and Wor(l)ding’, New Directions in Literature and Philosophy ed. Ridvan Askin, Frida Beckman and David Rudrun (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
2018 ‘Beyond Surface Articulation: Deleuze’s Alice and the Hermunculus’, Deleuze and Children ed. Markus Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
2017 ‘”What Happened Next?”: Hjelmslev’s net, Arachne’s web and the figure of the line in Plateau 8’, A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy ed. Henry Somers-Hall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
PUBLISHED POEMS
2017 ‘Gertrude Stein Does Proteus at Sunset on Blackpool Promenade’, ‘RAWR’, ‘Jellyfish’, ‘Break’, The Minnesota Review: a journal of creative and critical writing, Issue 88 (2017), Special Focus Section: New Materialist Genealogies (Duke University Press)
2015 ‘Play’, ‘Bank Holiday Swim’, ‘Red Light Jam’, ‘Alice and Leibniz (a love song)’, We Are A Website: New Literary Journal, Issue 1 (2015)
MISCELLANEOUS
2018 (with Vicky Hunter) ‘Worlding’, New Materialism Almanac <newmaterialism.eu/almanac/worlding>
2016 (with Stanimir Panayotov) ‘Transversality’, New Materialism Almanac <newmaterialism.eu/almanac/t/transversality>
2016 Review of Marie-Luise Angerer, Desire After Affect, Radical Philosophy 198 (Jul/Aug 2016)