Simon Cooke
Senior Lecturer

- English Literature
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Contact details
- Tel: +44 (0)131 651 3996
- Email: Simon.Cooke@ed.ac.uk
- Web: Edinburgh Research Explorer profile
Address
- Street
-
Room 3.07
50 George Square - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9LH
Availability
Office hours for Semester 1, 2023-24: Thursdays, 11.30am-12.30pm. Please feel free to drop in to my office without an appointment during this time, or email if you're unable to make my usual office hour to make an alternative appointment.
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, and became Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in 2014.
Undergraduate teaching
- Fourth-year and PG option: Modern and Contemporary Life-Writing
- Fourth-year ad PG option: Fiction and Espionage (with Prof. Penny Fielding)
- Third-year option: Mystery and Horror (with Prof. Penny Fielding)
- Fourth-year option: Cities of Literature: Metropolitan Modernities (with Dr David Farrier)
- Course Organiser (from Semester 2 2022): Literary Studies 1B
- Dissertation supervision
Postgraduate teaching
- MSc Literature and Modernity I: Modernist Aesthetics (Semester 1)
- LLC Research Methods Workshops: International Approaches in the Humanities; Travel Writing as Research Field; Working with Author Archives; Research in Modern and Contemporary Literature
- Dissertation supervision (English Literature and sometimes also Comparative Literature)
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
I am currently close to full capacity with doctoral supervision, but would be happy to receive inquiries from prospective doctoral researchers whose interests coincide with or complement my own, as I may have more availability in the near future.
Current PhD students supervised
Alan Goodson - The Real Figure in the Carpet: Biofiction and the Making of Henry James. PhD p/t, year 3.
Maxime Geervliet - The Self on Trial: Confession in Knausgaard, Cusk and Almadhoun. PhD, year 2.
Rosie Sinclair - Muriel Spark and Music (jointly supervised with Allyson Stack). PhD p/t, year 2.
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. Modernism, life writing, the literature of travel, and secrecy in literature, 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). Alongside essays and collaborations in these areas, he is working on two books. One is an essayistic memoir called Baba Yaga's Library: Reading, Writing, and Literary Gifts. This explores the place of reading in a life and in the wider culture through a sequence of books received or understood as gifts, and through the wider theme of gifts, givens, and giftedness. The other is 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 research background is in the literature of travel, which was the subject of his first monograph - Travellers' Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald - published by EUP in February 2013.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).
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.
-
A 'world of method and intrigue': Muriel Spark's literary intelligence
(20 pages)
In:
Modernist Cultures, vol. 16, pp. 488-508
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2021.0349
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Women, Modernism, and Intelligence Work, special issue of Modernist Cultures: Edited by Simon Cooke and Natalie Ferris
(16 pages)
In:
Modernist Cultures, vol. 16, pp. 433-448
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Special issue (Published) -
'Parler de soi': Jean Rhys and the uses of life writing
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501361326.ch-004
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Literary remains: Muriel Spark, auto|biography, and the archive
(34 pages)
In:
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. N/A, pp. 1-33
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1775976
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print) -
Inner journeys: Travel writing as life writing
(9 pages)
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Travellers' Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald
Research output: › Book (Published) -
Sebald's ghosts: Traveling among the dead in the Rings of Saturn
(16 pages)
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Sebald's Ghosts: Travelling Among the Dead in The Rings of Saturn
(16 pages)
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
Chatwin's Postmodern Quest: In Patagonia
Research output: › Chapter (Published) -
The Beginnings of the Modernist Short Story of Consciousness: Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle”
Research output: › Chapter (Published)