Dr Jess Cotton, Faculty of English

jc2384@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

I am a research associate in the Faculty of English, where I also completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, and a research associate of Jesus College. I was born and educated in London. I have previously held teaching and research positions at Cardiff University, UCL and Queen Mary, University of London.

I am currently working on a project with Professor Clair Wills on risk and responsibility in social institutions. My research for the first strand of this project is focused on risk in psychosocial institutions and is interested both in the changing legality of psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice and the genre of the case study. I have an article related to this research that is forthcoming on ideas of security in Marion Milner’s case history The Hands of the Living God. The second strand considers ideas of criminality in New Journalism and my writing on Janet Malcolm’s work is forthcoming in a special issue of Critical Quarterly (edited by Josh Pugh and Natalie Ferris). As part of a third strand of this project I am writing on ideas of risk, women and the state in the work of Gillian Rose for a special issue of Critical Quarterly on Rose and Literature (edited by Louis Klee and Rob Scott). I am also currently working on an edited volume with Christian Gelder on psychoanalysis and its discontents.

Prior to this project I completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship on loneliness in literature and psychoanalysis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research Interests

I work on topics in literature, psychoanalysis and cultural history, focusing on modern and contemporary literature, theories of the novel and lyric. I am also interested and have written on the history of feminism and ideas of fictionality and non-fictionality.

I am currently completing a book titled Lonely Subjects: Imagining Solitude in Post-War Literature and Psychoanalysis. It is a project about postwar psychoanalysis and the novel that begins with Samuel Beckett and Donald Winnicott, and focuses on a number of writers and psychoanalysts including Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Anna Kavan, Wilfred Bion, Joan Riviere, Ann Quin, Sam Selvon, John Berger, Michael Balint and Marion Milner. It shows how loneliness becomes an expression of a range of social discontents in the 1950s, and maps out how histories of feeling are experienced, created and registered through the history of the novel and the history of psychoanalysis.

I am working on a trade version of this book, provisonally titled Disappearing Acts, which looks at the relation between loneliness and risk, and the history of the women’s movement. It is particularly interested in the unmarried as a lonely state of relation and what that state means politically and narratively.

 

 

Selected Publications

I have published articles in journals such as Critical Quarterly, ELH, Essays and Studies, Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of American Studies, and New Formations and Textual Practice.

I edited a special collection of New Formations on loneliness and of Essays and Studies on literature and welfare.

I have published a study of John Ashbery (Reaktion Books/Chicago Books).

I have published reviews and related writing in the Nation, Jacobin, Harper’s, the TLS, the LA Review of Books.

My recent essays have focused on George Orwell and Punishment, Frank O’Hara and race, and the new woman and poetry. I have also written essays on Elizabeth Bishop, Joe Brainard and Denise Riley.