Dr Barbara Cooke

Barbara is a textual editor and creative non-fiction writer with interests in archival theory, creative writing pedagogy and multimodality. Her periods of focus are interwar and twenty-first century literature. She is the co-executive editor of the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project and sits on the editorial board of the Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford. Barbara is Vice-Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies.

Barbara publishes both technical and theoretical works relating to manuscript and other archival studies. She also draws on psychogeography to write non-fiction for a general audience, including Evelyn Waugh’s Oxford (Bodleian Publications). She is currently exploring the contribution narrative settings make to the development of romantic relationships in literature, and working with Prof Martin Stannard on two volumes of personal writings for the Ford Madox Ford project.

Barbara is an experienced teacher of Creative Writing, Modernism, Narrative Theory and the literature and culture of grief and morning. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to all subjects, mixing references to pop and alternative culture with forgotten classics and overlooked experimental works. She enjoys bringing real-world experience into the classroom.

Current:

• Caspar Wort: ‘I Speak to You: The Perceived Relationship Between Speaker and Addressee in Contemporary Poetry.’
• Adelle Hay: ‘The Boring Brontë: How Anne Brontë was edited out of the literary canon.’
• Lisa Climie-Somers: ‘Unfaithful Women.’

Recent:

• Lou Goswell: ‘‘Britain’s Proud Story’: Untangling SOE Narratives Through Historiographic Metafiction.’
• Sophia Kier-Byfield: ‘Reconceptualising feminist pedagogies in higher education: theoretical narratives, political frameworks and institutional dynamics.’
• Thomas O’Brien: ‘Social class in the writings of Patricia Highsmith.’

• Cooke, Barbara, and Milthorpe, Naomi (2024). ‘“Will future editor kindly omit ...”: Evelyn Waugh in conversation with his archives’. Jamie Callison, Anna Svendsen, and Erik Toning (eds), Modernist Archives: A Handbook. Bloomsbury Academic
• Cooke, B. & Williams, N. H., (2024) “Moments of Being-in-the-Archive”, Open Library of Humanities 10(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.10468
• Cooke, B. (2023). Waugh’s Green World: Reconceptualising The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as a Transcoded Production of King Lear. Shakespeare, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2196968
• ‘Difficult Beings: Jim Ede, T. E. Lawrence and the making of Kettle’s Yard.’ The Journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society 32: 2 (Spring 2023), pp. 8-26.
• The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Volume 14: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Oxford University Press (2022). 317pp.
• Evelyn Waugh's Oxford, 1922-1966. Bodleian Library Publishing (2018). 176pp.
• 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). 680pp.
• 'Organising a Large Edition'. Claire Loffman and Harriet Phillips (eds.), A Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts. Routledge (2017), pp. 43-8.