Simon Cook

Dr. Simon Cook serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication within the Humanities faculty at Utrecht University. His office is located in Transcomplex Building, Room 113, Utrecht. His primary research and teaching focus centers on Modern and Contemporary Literature, with particular expertise in 20th and 21st century Anglo-American fiction.

Cook's research interests explore the representation of pornography and sexualization in contemporary literature, with significant scholarly attention to authors including Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Martin Amis, David Foster Wallace, Angela Carter, and contemporary writers such as Zadie Smith and Ali Smith. His work examines how literary texts engage with the 'pornification' of everyday culture and the boundaries between literary fiction and sexual representation.

His teaching portfolio includes courses on Anxiety and Addiction in Contemporary Fiction, Creative Writing, International Journalism, and Rewarding Literature. He supervises BA theses with particular focus on contemporary authors and accepts a limited number of creative writing projects, requiring students to produce both exegetical statements and original creative works of 5,000-6,000 words.

Cook completed his PhD in 2017 with the dissertation "The Obscenification of Everyday Life: Representing Pornography in Anglo-American Fiction since 1970," which examined literary responses to pornification through the works of Pynchon, Ballard, Amis, and Wallace. His scholarly output includes publications in Textual Practice and contributions to edited collections on Pynchon, demonstrating his specialized knowledge in postmodern American literature and sexual representation.