Simon Cooke

Senior Lecturer

Background

Simon Cooke studied for an undergraduate degree in English Literature at Hull University (2000), and then for an MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture at University College London (2003); he then moved to Germany to join the International PhD Programme (IPP) ‘Literary and Cultural Studies’ with a scholarship at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen. At JLU, Simon taught in the Department of English and American Studies, and from 2009-10 was a Research Co-ordinator of the IPP. He returned to the UK in 2010 to take up a Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, where from April to September 2012 he also covered as administrator for the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. He joined the English Department at Edinburgh University as a Post Doctoral Research Fellow in autumn 2012,  was appointed Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in 2014, and became a Senior Lecturer in 2022.

CV

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Undergraduate teaching

  • Fourth-year and PG option: Modern and Contemporary Life-Writing
  • Fourth-year ad PG option: Fiction and Espionage (with Prof. Penny Fielding)
  • Fourth-year core and PG option (team taught with David Farrier as organiser): Strangers to Ourselves: Postwar and Contemporary Writing 
  • Dissertation supervision

Postgraduate teaching

  • Fourth-year and PG option: Modern and Contemporary Life-Writing
  • Fourth-year ad PG option: Fiction and Espionage (with Prof. Penny Fielding)
  • Fourth-year core and PG option (team taught with David Farrier as organiser): Strangers to Ourselves: Postwar and Contemporary Writing 
  • Dissertation supervision (English Literature and sometimes also Comparative Literature)

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I would be happy to receive inquiries from prospective doctoral researchers whose interests and approaches coincide with or complement my own.  

Current PhD students supervised

Alan Goodson - The Real Figure in the Carpet: Biofiction and the Making of Henry James. PhD p/t, year 4.

Maxime Geervliet - The Self on Trial: Confession in Knausgaard, Cusk and Almadhoun. PhD, year 3. 

 

 

 

 

Past PhD students supervised

Angus Sutherland - 'opaque images of broken rebellion': W.G. Sebald's Emblematics. Successful award 2023. 

Nicole Chen - A 'Self in Process': Contemporary Biofictions of Virginia Woolf. Successful award 2022. 

Saori Mita - Queer Spies in Literature, Film, TV, and Theatre (jointly supervised with - as lead - Dr David Sorfa. Successful award 2021. 

MScR II: Alan Goodson - The Foreigner in (Popular) Fiction: Comparing Victorian and Contemporary Representations'. Successful award 2018.

MScR II: Adam Bloom -  Vladimir Nabokov and the Real. Successful award 2015.

Research summary

Simon's broad interests lie in modern and contemporary English and comparative literature. He has published on writers including Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul, W.G. Sebald, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark. Modernism, life writing, the literature of travel, and secrecy in literature, the relations between 'creative' and 'critical' writing, are among his areas of special interest. 

 

Current research interests

Simon's current research falls into two main areas: life-writing (and the relations between writers' lives and works); and literature and secrecy (particularly the relations between literature and espionage). He's writing an essay on the cultural politics of prizes in literature and the arts, drawing on the experience of being a staff judge of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, in the Biography category, from 2019-2024; a novella, Parting Words; and a memoir of reading, Baba Yaga's Library: Reading, Writing and Literary Gifts. Other plans include a monograph called Forms of Secrecy: Espionage and the Literary Imagination, which focuses on the ways writers across the long twentieth century have responded, directly and indirectly, formally as well as thematically, to the emergence and development of secret services as a feature of public institutional and political life (focusing on, among others, Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith, Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark).

Past research interests

Simon's main research background is in the literature of travel, which was the subject of his first monograph - Travellers' Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald (EUP 2013) as well as articles related to this field.

Knowledge exchange

At Edinburgh, Simon is convenor of the Edinburgh Life-Writing Network (https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/elwn/), which also links in to his work as judge of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography (https://www.ed.ac.uk/events/james-tait-black) (as lead judge 2019-2024).

He is a co-director of the Edinburgh Network for Studies in Secrecy (https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/ensis/) , which evolved from Edinburgh Spy Week (http://www.spyweek.ed.ac.uk/).  

He was one of the co-founders and former convenors, with Dr Clare Broome Saunders and Dr Tom F. Wright, of Travel Cultures: An Oxford Interdisciplinary Research Seminar, and a co-founder and former co-organiser, with Prof. Timothy Mathews (UCL), of the podcast interview series Between the Lines: Literature and the Arts in Translation.