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Neil Cocks

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Areas of interest

My research questions the self-evident through close reading. It follows that I am especially interested in analysing discourses that seem straightforward, simplistic, and unquestionable. This has led me to engage extensively with Children's Literature, as it is often taken to grant access to immediate truths. Utilizing only an accurate reading of narration, my aim is to defamiliarize these texts, and from this question wider societal appeals to structure, sexuality, objecthood, agency, and identity. In developing a text-based, non-essentialist approach to literature, I have become interested in critiquing a wide variety of discourses that are claimed in some way to be resistant to reading, including: 'the material turn'; 'the turn to affect'; contemporary film theory; evolutionary psychology; discourses of student-centred education; the literature of childhood in general; new-managerialism, especially in Higher Education; libertarian, 'classic liberal', 'radical humanist', and Objectivist discourse; contemporary free speech discourse; sex; race; the Lacanian Real.

Postgraduate supervision

I am an experienced PhD supervisor, and would be happy to discuss potential PhD supervision in childhood and literature, childhood and image, nineteenth century literature, The Gothic, or GRT identity.

Teaching

At Reading, I have taught and convened IFP, all levels of BA, and I offer two modules on the MA in Children's Literature, the oldest course of its type in the world.

Research centres and groups

I am a member of CIRCL (The Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture and Media), and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I have published numerous articles and book chapters on subjects as diverse as children's literature, art theory, Dickens, queer theory, education theory, Objectivism, and the problematic claims of evolutionary psychology. I have also published four books. The first, from 2009, is a critique of student-centred education. A reworked ‘second edition’ of this text is to be published shortly (2023). I followed this initial work in 2014 with a monograph concerned with overlooked children in nineteenth century English literature, and the difficulties that arise from reading something in a text that has not previously been noticed. The book includes extended engagements with work by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, and Christina Rossetti. My most recent single-authored book offers an original engagement with Higher Education discourse, one that takes its cue from approaches more usually associated with literary studies. It was reviewed by Prof. Ian Parker as an 'astonishing and necessary book [...] an argument for and exemplar of good critical textual practice', and by Dr. Jan de Vos as 'mandatory reading for scholars and their managers'. I have recently edited the first edited collection to offer a sustained critique the work of Ayn Rand. It was reviewed by Prof. Daniela Caselli as a 'dazzling partisan reading [that] makes the case for the importance of a debate that has not quite happened yet'. I am presently working with Dr Daniel Renshaw in the History Department at the University of Reading on an edited collection that offers both historical and literary approaches to the Gothic.

I publish and perform poetry and record music under the name 'Obby Robinson'. I am presently writing the soundtrack for a short animated film by Hannah Taggart. This will feature vocals from Sam Owen from the band Pram.

Research projects

Over the last 4 years, I have undertaken a sustained questioning of Žižekian psychoanalysis, but my research focus has recently shifted (although questioning Žižek and his fellow travellers remains an important activity to me). I am presently working on a number of projects: a website providing open access to academic work that is difficult to place within the contemporary Humanities/theory scene (but not for the standard reasons of 'controversy'); an article on angles in Derrida’s ‘Fors’; a special issue of the journal Humanities on ‘Constructing the Political in Children’s Literature’, and a reading of architecture, Roma, and translation in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I am also working with The Museum of English Rural Life on a range of projects engaging GRT history and representation, especially in relation to the Robert Dawson archive at Reading.

Outreach

I am Head of Outreach in the Department of English Literature, and I am always delighted to receive outreach requests. For more information about the Department's outreach activity, please make contact through my email address.

Publications

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