Dr Helen Chambers

Professional biography

After graduating  in medicine with first class honours from Monash University, Australia I followed a postgraduate career path as a specialist pathologist and pathology researcher,  for over 30 years in Canadian, Australian, and UK university hospitals, including  as visiting senior lecturer (2004-5) at Imperial College, London.  In 2006  I made a radical late career change, gaining an MA  Lit (Open) with distinction in 2008, followed   by a PhD (Open) in 2014,  with a thesis on an evidence-based investigation into Joseph Conrad's  reading. Since 2015 I have since been an Honorary  Associate/Visiting Fellow in the English Department, was a member of the project group of the Reading Experience Database UKRED and of the Book History Research Group now HOBAR (History of the Book and Reading ) Research Collaboration and was actively involved with history of reading research at UK and European level. I have published on Conrad, Ford and Galsworthy, and am now fully occupied with the major OUP project The Collected Works of Ford Madox Ford, coediting two volumes of his letters and have submitted a proposal for an edited volume of several of his fictional works

Research interests

These include

• Ford Madox Ford's life, letters and reading practices
• other late 19th-early 20th century English and French literary and travelling multilingual readers 
• maritime cultures of reading and writing
• bibliotherapy 

Teaching interests

I have no formaL teaching role at present

External collaborations

Those related to the CWFMF project