Helen Thompson is Professor of English at Northwestern University (in Evanston, Illinois, USA), where she specializes in literature and philosophy of the long eighteenth century, history of science, and literary and feminist theory. Her most recent book is Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (U Penn Press, 2017). Her IIAS project, “Transmuting Forms: Alchemical Books, Secret Histories, and Antirealism in Britain, 1645 – 1720,” argues that early modern English chymical books and political secret histories representational strategies which mark an “antirealist” mode of truth-telling in narrative. Thompson claims seventeenth-century alchemical print books as modes of scientific knowledge that do not premise their claims to experimental knowledge on transparent or neutral representation; instead, with the emergent genre of the secret history, these narrative forms take shape to accommodate knowledge that exceeds the capacities of empirical perception.