Our staff
Dr Jennifer Cooke
Tel: +44 01509 222926
Role: Lecturer in English
Email: J.A.Cooke@lboro.ac.uk
Room QQ.0.10 John Hardie, East Park
Publications
My research interests lie in twentieth- and twenty-first century experimental writing, from the modernist period to contemporary poetics, and in critical theory. I’m currently writing Experimentalism, Intimacy, Affect, which examines representations of intimacy in innovative writing and the concomitant affect aimed for by textual strategies of narrative, poetic and theoretical experimentalism. I also have specific interests in and publications on: psychoanalysis (its history, impact and subsequent theorisation); modernist female writers; contemporary innovative poetry; and the work of Hélène Cixous. In September 2010, I organised the international conference ‘The Writings of Intimacy in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries’ which took place at Loughborough. Our keynote speakers were Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips. I am currently editing Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorising Contemporary Literature and a special issue of Textual Practice entitled Challenging Intimacies: Legacies of Psychoanalysis, which disseminate work developed from the event.
My previous research project examined plague as a metaphor in twentieth-century theatre, cinema theory, zombie films, narrative, psychoanalysis, political theory, and anti-Semitism. It resulted in the book, Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film (Palgrave, 2009).
My other interests include the Frankfurt School critical theorists, and the relationship between the political and the imagination. I also have a variety of publications on current contemporary poetry and regularly review other poets' work, attend readings, and am a poet myself. I welcome proposals from potential Ph.D students interested in any of the above areas.
I am part of the Loughborough University Anarchist Research Group; the Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community group; and co-organise a poetry reading group in London.
In semester two, 2011-12, I will be teaching 'Philosophy, Literature and the Visual Arts', 'The Writings of Intimacy' and 'Critical Studies 2' (BA). I convene the Modern and Contemporary MA Pathway, as well as the second semester MA course ‘Literary London’, which I also teach on.
In press, forthcoming (click above for published work):
*not suitable for domestic sublimation [poetry collection] (Guildford: Contraband Press, 2011)
‘Dorothy Richardson, Queer Theorist’,Pilgrimages: The Dorothy Richardson Journal, Vol. 4 (2011).
Recent conference papers (2009-2011):
‘From Normative Unhappiness to Non-Normative Bliss: Modernist Intimacies in Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson', London Modernism Seminar (May 2012) and Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community, London (Nov 2011).
‘Dorothy Ricahrdson, Queer Theorist’ at The Third International Dorothy Richardson Conference, Birkbeck, London, Sept, 2011.
‘“They’re safety matches, sir, / And they light only on the knowledge box”: danger and desire in the discourses of knowledge within Andrea Brady’s Wildfire’ at Legacies of Modernism: British Poetry Today, Paris, June 2011.
‘An Intimate Category of Female Being: States of Solitary Bliss in Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson’ at Shaping Modernisms: Katherine Mansfield and Her Contemporaries, Cambridge University, March 2011.
‘Challenging Autobiography: The Intimate Life Fictions of Hélène Cixous’, International Auto/Biographical Association, 7th Biennial Conference, Sussex University, upcoming in June 2010.
‘The Risks of Intimate Writing: Loving and Dreaming with Hélène Cixous’, Dundee University, December 2009, and University of Surrey, March 2010.
‘Impersonal Intimacy or Improbable Theory: Appraising a Recent Psychoanalytic Rethinking of Intimacy’, 3rd Global Conference: Persons, Intimacy and Love, Salzburg, Austria, November 2009.
Round table participant at the invitation of the committee for the conference Rhetorics of Plague, SUNY at Albany, New York, March 2009.
Some poetry:
Video of reading for The Other Room, Manchester
‘Of Ponds and Pools, I-IV’ on Infinite Editions blog
5 poems online at Great Works'Congelatine' and 'The Profundity of Cod' in Onedit 11, 2008.
'Carcinogeneticide' and 'Drinking It In' in Quid, 18, 2007.
'Phew' online at Intercapillary Space