Neil Cocks

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.