Dr 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 am also part of the Screen Work Group at The University of Reading. 

 I have published numerous articles and book chapters on subjects as diverse as children's literature, art theory, Dickens, queer theory, education theory, Objectivism, race, and the problematic claims of evolutionary psychology. From early 2026, I will have published six books.

The first, from 2009, is a critique of student-centred education. A reworked ‘second edition’ of this text was published in 2023. In 2017, I returned to education theory with 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'.

My first publication whilst working at The University of Reading was 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 (2014). The book includes extended engagements with work by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, and Christina Rossetti. In 2020 I edited the first collection of essays offering a sustained critique of 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'.  More recently (2025), I edited with Dr Daniel Renshaw (Department of History, University of Reading) a collection for Routledge that offers both historical and literary approaches to the Gothic.

In January 2026, I will publish a new book with Routledge. Deconstructing the idea of ‘racial encounter’, it stages its own encounter with: a doubling take on Gypsy aesthetics from artists Daniel Baker and Paul Ryan; Boots Riley’s smart and smarter-than-you-think Amazon series I’m a Virgo;  Baudrillard’s rightfully controversial America.  

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.