Dr Barbara Cooke

My interests in twentieth-century and modernist (auto)biography, life writing and archival research underpin my current project, the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. I serve as co-executive editor with Professor Martin Stannard on this 43-volume edition, which is under the general editorship of Alexander Waugh and publishing with Oxford University Press. I have recently co-edited Waugh's autobiography A Little Learning for the project and am now at work on the autobiographical 'conversation piece' The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

I am delighted to share my love of narrative, and non-fictional narrative in particular, through my postgraduate creative writing teaching and contributions to the first-year 'Narrative Forms and Fictions' module.

Key areas: textual editing, publishing industry, life writing, modernism, non-fictional narrative, colonialism, global literature

• Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, 1922-1966. Bodleian Library Publishing (forthcoming 2018).
• Cooke, Barbara and John Howard Wilson (eds.) The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Volume 18: A Little Learning with A Little Hope. Oxford University Press (2017).
•  'Organising a Large Edition (with An Early Modern Addendum by Claire Loffman & Harriet Phillips)'. Claire Loffman and Harriet Phillips (eds.), A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts. Routledge (2017).
• ‘“The Eastern Glow Where the Big Sons Go”: Arnold Wilson, Clifton College and the First World War.’ Lissa Paul and Rosemary Johnston (eds), Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War. Routledge (2015).
• ‘“Bloody Fool’: Evelyn Waugh’s life as a 1920s Oxford Aesthete.’ The Conversation [online], 7 April 2016
• ‘The Adventures of Miss Ross: Interventions into, and the tenacity of, romance narrative in South West Persia.’ Journeys: The International Journal of Travel & Travel Writing. Vol. 16, No. 1(Summer 2015), pp. 54-74
• ‘Glorious Debo: Evelyn Waugh’s adoration of the last Mitford sister.’ The Conversation [online], 25 September 2014
• ‘Threshold People: Liminal Subjectivity in Etienne van Heerden, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.’ The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays. Palgrave Macmillan, October 2012

I welcome expressions of interest from research students interested in Evelyn Waugh or other figures in his circle, mid-century modern/modernist literature, textual editing, life writing, and any work that interrogates the boundaries of creative and critical writing.