Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Dr Helen Dampier
Senior Lecturer
Helen Dampier is Senior Lecturer in Social and Cultural History. Her research and teaching reflect her critical interest in life writings, and in nineteenth and twentieth century South African history. Her work considers the histories of imperialism and apartheid in South Africa, life writings, nationalism, and the conjunction of gender/politics.
Current Teaching
Helen currently teaches a number of undergraduate modules including:
- Trade, Colonisation & Empire
- Slavery & Unfree Labour
- Genocide & the Politics of Memory
- Apartheid & After: Twentieth Century South Africa
At MA level Helen teaches the module:
- Debating Documents of Life in Twentieth Century History
Research Interests
Helen's research is strongly interdisciplinary and its broad thematic concerns include memory, life writing, and historiography and its claims. Its substantive focus is on the history of South Africa, and it has critically examined the use of life writings and especially women's testimonies as historical sources, the political aftermaths of the 1899-1902 South African War, women in the development of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa, and letters as a tool of women's politicking.
Helen was co-investigator on the ESRC-funded Olive Schreiner Letters Project, which made the extant letters of the South African writer and feminist Olive Schreiner fully and freely available for the first time. This publication of Schreiner's letters now provides the standard epistolary source material for Schreiner scholars worldwide. The project also produced a number of joint and individual publications concerning both letters and epistolarity, and Schreiner's political and cultural activities.
More recently Helen was principal investigator on the AHRC-funded Emily Hobhouse Letters Project, which explored the life and legacy of the British relief worker Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926). In 2019 the project produced two exhibitions on Hobhouse. The UK exhibition, 'War Without Glamour: Emily Hobhouse's Peace Activism 1899-1926', was displayed at the University of Huddersfield, Hull History Centre, the Alfred Gillett Trust, Leeds Beckett University, and Liskeard Museum in Cornwall, near Hobhouse's birthplace. In South Africa the project exhibition was entitled 'War Without Glamour: The Life and Legacy of Emily Hobhouse' and it was displayed at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein and hosted by the Free State Arts Festival.
In 2022 Helen joined the AHRC-funded project 'The Letters of Richard Cobden Online' project as a co-investigator. The project, led by Professor Simon Morgan, will use the letters of Victorian stateman Richard Cobden to explore active citizenship.
Ask Me About
- Feminism
- History
Selected Outputs
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Dampier H (2021) ‘Undoubtedly Love Letters’? Olive Schreiner’s Letters to Karl Pearson. Literature and History, 30 (1), pp. 26-44.
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Dampier H (2017) ‘Stories That Find their Place’: Retelling the Protest at Brandfort, 1901-1949. South African Historical Journal, 69 (3), pp. 361-376.
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Dampier HC (2016) ‘Going on with our little movement in the hum drum-way which alone is possible in a land like this’: Olive Schreiner and suffrage networks in Britain and South Africa, 1905-1913. Women's History Review
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Stanley L; Dampier H (2013) 'I Just Express My Views & Leave Them to Work': Olive Schreiner as a Feminist Protagonist in a Masculine Political Landscape with Figures. , pp. 157-180.
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Stanley L; Salter A; Dampier H (2013) The Work of Making and the Work it Does: Cultural Sociology and 'Bringing- Into-Being' the Cultural Assemblage of the Olive Schreiner Letters. Cultural Sociology, 7 (3), pp. 287-302.
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Stanley L; Salter A; Dampier H (2013) Olive Schreiner, epistolary practices and microhistories: A cultural entrepreneur in a historical landscape. Cultural and Social History, 10 (4), pp. 577-597.
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Dampier HC; Stanley L; Salter A (2010) Olive Schreiner Globalising Social Inquiry: A Feminist Analytics of Globalisation. The Sociological Review, 58 (4), pp. 657-680.
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Stanley L; Dampier HC (2010) Aftermaths: post/memory, commemoration and the concentration camps of the South African War 1899–1902. European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire, 12 (1), pp. 91-119.
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Dampier HC (2008) Re-reading as a Methodology: The Case of Boer Women's Testimonies. Qualitative Research, 8 (3), pp. 367-377.
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Stanley L; Dampier HC (2006) Simulacrum Diaries: Time, the “moment of writing,” and the diaries of Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo. Life Writing, 3 (2), pp. 25-52.
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Dampier HC (2013) Identifying the Quotidian in the Heterotopic Universe of Olive Schreiner's Letters. In: Stanle L ed. The Documents of Life Revisted: Narrative and Biographical Methods for a 21st Century Critical Humanism. Ashgate,
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Dampier HC (2005) 'Everyday Life' in Boer Women’s Testimonies of the Concentration Camps of the South African War, 1899-1902. In: Godfrey BS; Dunstall G ed. Crime and empire, 1840-1940. Willan Pub,
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