Helen Brooks is Professor of Cultural and Creative History at the University of Kent. Prior to working on First World War theatre she published widely on eighteenth-century theatre. Her book Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women was published in 2014. She is an editor of the Exeter Performance Studies series and was associate editor of the Wiley Encyclopaedia of British Literature: 1660–1789. She was a co-investigator with the Gateways to the First World War centre (2014–2019).