Helen Hackett

Helen Hackett is a Professor of English Literature at University College London. She specialises in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, including Shakespeare. She enjoys setting literature in its historical contexts, and she has particular interests in writing by and about Renaissance women. Her latest book, 'The Elizabethan Mind', explores how the mind was thought to relate to body, soul, and self, and how the intellectual and cultural turmoil of the sixteenth century generated new ways of representing thought in writing. Her next book will investigate connections between women and the imagination in the early modern period. In an era when the imagination provoked widespread distrust and disapproval, and was regarded as especially wayward in women, how did emerging female writers understand and express their creativity?