Professor Jennifer Cooke

DPhil (Sussex University)

Pronouns: She/her
  • REF2029 UoA Lead for D27
  • Professor of Contemporary Literature and Theory
Publications
Google Scholar
photo of Professor Jennifer Cooke

Academic Career

  • Professor of Contemporary Literature and Theory, Loughborough University, 2024.
  • Reader in Contemporary Literature and Theory, Loughborough University, 2021.
  • Head of English, Loughborough University, Aug 2020 – July 2024.
  • Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough University, 2014.
  • Lecturer in English, Loughborough University, 2007.

 Fellowships and Visiting Scholar Positions

  • Loughborough University Fellowship, 1st August 2025 – 31st July 2026.
  • Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 1st September 2024 – 30th June 2025.
  • Loughborough University Fellowship, 1st August 2019 – 31st July 2020.
  • Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Life-writing, Wolfson College, Oxford University, 2015-2016.

Prizes

Editorial and Research Review Roles

  • Co-editor, Elements in Feminism and Contemporary Critical Theoryseries for Cambridge University Press.
  • Editorial Board, Prose
  • External Review Board, European Journal of Life-Writing.
  • Editorial Boards for the Routledge Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays Series.
  • Associate Editor for the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing, 2018-2021. 
  • Member of the AHRC Peer Review College, 2017 – present. 

Association Membership and Roles

  • Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
  • British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS)
  • Feminist and Women’s Studies Association
  • Fellow of the HEA
  • Treasurer on the BACLS Executive Committee, 2016 – 2019.

Jennifer’s recent research focuses on contemporary literature and theories of feminism, social reproduction, and how gender intersects with the national and transnational distribution of care and domestic labour. This has included work drawing on the medical and health humanities. Her current monograph project is titled The Help Deficit and the Stories We Tell to Dispel It and examines the figures of the nurse, the carer, the cleaner, the nanny, and the surrogate in memoir and narrative fiction.

Her last monograph, Contemporary Women’s Life-Writing: The New Audacity examined auto/biographical writing and drew on feminism and sexuality, gender, queer, and trans theory. A recent book chapter examines contemporary poems of abortion and miscarriage that refuse the commonplace focus around pregnancy on the child-to-come.

Jennifer is also a poet, regularly gives readings across the UK and beyond, and is currently finishing a novel. 

Jennifer’s teaching areas of expertise are literary and critical theory, especially feminism, queer and gender theory, social reproduction theory, and theorisations of care and domestic labour. She teaches literature from the twentieth to twenty-first century and contributes to the MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture and the MA in Creative Writing and the Writing Industries. 

Current

  • Abigail Mills, ‘Weird Waterscapes and Aquaphobia’.
  • Megan Constable, ‘Writing as Other: Investigating the Right to Write in Fictional Representation of Disability with a Creative Response’.
  • Kate Mulhern, ‘Feminism is Praxis: Reading and Theorising Acts of Making and Unmaking in Twenty-First Century Feminist Fiction’.

Recent

  • 2024: Demi Wilton, ‘Environmental Displacement and World Literature’.
  • 2022 - Lottie Hazell, ‘Swallowing Feelings: Examining Disclosure in Contemporary Food-centric Fiction’.
  • 2022 - Hazel McMichael, ‘The Art of Being Spoken Through: Ventriloquism as Feminism after Conceptualism’.
  • 2022 - Oliver Haslam, ‘Minimalism in American Literature, 1970-2020’.
  • 2021 - Lauren Whitehouse, Genderqueer in the Sporting Sphere: An Oral History Project of Non-binary Sporting Lives’.
  • 2017 - Teresa O’Rourke, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Liminality: New Transcendentalism in Contemporary American Women’s Writing’.
  • 2016 - Jennifer Nichol, ‘Escape Artists: Adventure and Isolation in Women’s Writing at the Fin de Siècle’.
  • 2016 - Georgia Walker Churchman, ‘This Demented Land: Representations of Madness in Contemporary Scottish Fiction’.

Monographs

  • Contemporary Feminist Life-writing: The New Audacity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
  • Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Edited Collections

  • Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies: Applications in the Social Sciences and Humanities, co-edited with Line Nyhagen (Routledge, 2024). Open access.
  • The New Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
  • Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing, and Theorising Contemporary Literature (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

Poetry Chapbooks

  • Apocalypse Dreams (Bristol: Sad Press, 2015).
  • *Not Suitable for Domestic Sublimation (London: Contraband Press, 2012).