I am Head of Careers the Department of English Literature, and also the Outreach lead. I am always delighted to receive suggestions for collaboration and development in both areas. I will always respond positively to school requests for outreach. Please contact me on n.h.cocks@reading.ac.uk
Dr Neil Cocks
-
+44 (0) 118 378 7004
-
Associate Professor
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, The Gothic, or race/GRT identity.
Teaching
At Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ, 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 am also part of the Screen Work Group at The Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ.
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 five books. The first, from 2009, is a critique of student-centred education. A reworked ‘second edition’ of this text was published in 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 edited the first edited collection of essays offering 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'. With Dr Daniel Renshaw (History Department, Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ) I have recently edited a collection for Routledge that offers both historical and literary approaches to the Gothic.
In 2023, I edited a special issue of the journal Humanities, on 'Constructing the Political in Children's Literature'.
I publish and perform poetry and record music under the names 'Obby Robinson' and 'Ton TaubE'. In 2024 I completed the soundtrack for a stop-motion ghost story film by Hannah Taggart, featuring 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, including: a book on race and fantasy fiction; a short form book on ‘the racial encounter’, featuring chapters on I’m a Virgo, the Roma pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and Baudrillard’s America; with Dr Kristina West in the English Department of Royal Holloway, a journal issue on precarity and theory. 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 Ë¿¹ÏÊÓƵ.
Careers