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Jess Cotton has researched, written and taught on a wide range of issues in American and British literature, visual culture, feminism and psychoanalysis.

Academic interests

Jess Cotton’s academic interests include: 

• Postwar American and British literature
• Poetry 
• Psychoanalysis 
• Feminism 
• Cultural history.

Degrees obtained

• BA, UCL.
• MA, UCL.
• PhD, UCL.

Awards and prizes

• The English Association, Early Career Fellow.

Biography

Jess Cotton is a specialist of post-1945 British and American literature. She has written on cultures of literature, psychoanalysis, feminism and sexuality. She has a particular interest in the work of the New York School and New Journalism.

She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow working on a postwar study of loneliness in British culture, which examines the relationship between the emergence of loneliness in the postwar period and the health and cultural communities that are formed by the welfare state. This study focuses on particular health and literary institutions including the library and the hospital, and motherhood’s relation to communities of care.

Her research connects the history of literature, psychoanalysis and feminism. Ongoing projects include a study of the anachronistic time of postwar American literary history which moves from a chapter on Mary McCarthy’s representation of the 1930s in relation to narratives of progress to the stalled time of revolution in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters; and the institutions of psychiatric and literature communities in twentieth century United States, which focuses on case studies of psychiatric clinics including the Payne Whitney Clinic and the Lafargue Clinic, as well as the relationship between grassroots feminist therapeutic clinics and feminist consciousness raising in the 1970s. 

Other interests

Trains, mountains, Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes.