Accessibility Page Navigation
Style sheets must be enabled to view this page as it was intended.
University of Oxford Faculty of English
Home » About the Faculty » Faculty Members » Search Members by Period

Cooke, Dr Simon

Job Title: Research Fellow; Administrator (temp) for the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson
College: Wolfson
Period/ Subject: 20th/ 21st century

Email address: simon.cooke@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests: Modern and contemporary English and comparative literature. I am preparing my first monograph, Travellers' Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald, for publication (EUP) and working on a sequence with the working title of 'Gifts', in which each chapter concerns a book that was given to me.  

Teaching Areas: At Oxford (Magdalen), I am teaching a tutorial on Twentieth-Century Literature, and have taught a special option on Travel Writing. While at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, Germany, I convened and taught the following undergraduate seminars: 'The Nomadic Alternative': Issues in Contemporary Travel Writing (2007 and 2008); English Romanticism (2007-8); Modernism and the English Novel (2009); and The Figure of the Spy: 20th-century Espionage Fictions (2010). 

Recent Publications:   

Book:

  • R. Humphrey, A. Nünning, S. Cooke: Essential Study Skills for BA/MA in British and American Studies. Stuttgart, Klett: 2007

Academic Articles:

  • "Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia as Quest." In: Critical Insights: The Hero's Quest (ed. Bernard Schweizer and Robert Segal). EBSCO Publishing, forthcoming.  
  • “Sebald’s Ghosts: Travelling among the Dead in The Rings of Saturn.” In: Writing the Dark Side of Travel (ed. Jonathan Skinner). New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. This book is a revised version of a special edition of Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing: “Writings on the dark side of travel” (ed. Jonathan Skinner), July 2010. 
  • "Henry James and the Beginnings of the Modernist Short Story of Consciousness: 'The Beast in the Jungle'." In: A History of the American Short Story (ed. Michael Basseler). Trier: WVT, 2011.
  • “‘English as a Foreign Literature’: English Studies as a Travelling Concept.” In: The European Journal of English Studies (guest eds. Birgit Neumann and Frederik Tygestrup), Spring 2009.
  • “Cultural Memory on the Move: The Dynamics of Memory in the Contemporary Travel Narrative.” In: Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (eds. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). Berlin and New York, de Gruyter: 2009.
  • “A ‘convenient vehicle for miscellaneous discussions’: Literature, Science and the Travelogue.” In the volume of the proceedings for The Knowledge of Literature VII, ed. Angela Locatelli. Bergamo University Press: 2008.
  • “‘Unprofitable excursions’: The Ethics of Empathy in Modernist Discourses on Art and Literature.” In: Herbert Grabes & Astrid Erll (eds.), Ethics within Culture: The Dissemination of Value in Literature and Other Media. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter: 2008.
  • “The ‘ghosts of repetition’: On the Recurrence and Correspondences of Sebald’s Date of Birth in the Poetry and Prose fictions.” In: Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Analyses. Ansgar Nünning and Birgit Neumann (eds.). Trier, WVT: 2008.
  • "'Always somewhere else': Generic 'unclassifiability' in the work of W.G. Sebald." In: Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning (eds.). Trier, WVT: 2007. 

Other Information:

Co-founder with Dr Clare Broome Saunders (Wolfson) and Dr Tom Wright (then St Edmund Hall; now UEA) of the Travel Cultures Research Seminar (www.travelcultures.com). 

Co-founder with Prof Timothy Mathews (UCL) of 'Between the Lines: Literature and the Arts in Translation', a series of podcast panel discussions to take place at UCL (2012). 

College Website

Back to Faculty Members