Katherine Cooper

Katherine Cooper is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and LDC's Student Partnership Director. In this role she is responsible for providing a direct line of communication between LDC students and the School and University, as well as for facilitating community-building and learning support activities within LDC. She is particularly interested in supporting students with visible and invisible disabilities and students who may have had non-traditional routes into HE. As a result of this work she won the Equality and Diversity in Teaching Award in 2022, awarded by UEA Students Union.  She teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses across the modern and contemporary period including Living Modernism, Critical Theory and Practice, Banned Books, Contemporary Fiction and Feminist Writing. She previously taught at Newcastle University and at Teesside University before coming to UEA in 2017 as Senior Research Associate on the Writers Organisations and Free Expression project.

Katherine's research focuses around activism and literature, looking specifically at human rights, displacement and migration, and identity-building in the literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, her first book looked at the novels of the Yorkshire writer Margaret Storm Jameson – wartime President of English PEN – and was published with Bloomsbury in 2020. Her current project grew directly out of this work and looks at how British writers like Jameson formed activist networks to help refugees during World War Two exploring the sorts of ideas about human rights and European identity which underpinned this undertaking. More broadly, her research interests include literary archives and objects, women writers and the British regional novel.

She is on the advisory board of English, the journal of the English Association and is a member of the British Association of Modernist Studies.