Dr Katherine Cooper is Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia, where she is working with Professor Rachel Potter on an AHRC-funded project on the history of writers’ organisations and free expression. Her own work looks at intersections between ideas of war, nation and Europe in the mid-century, with particular emphasis on women’s writing, refugees and ideas of literary culture.
Her first book, War, Nation and Europe in the Novels of Margaret Storm Jameson is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (2020). She is currently working on a monograph which explores how British writers such as Rebecca West, H.G. Wells, J.B. Priestley and E.M. Forster worked together to help European refugee writers during World War Two, analysing how these activities were motivated by shared desires to save Europe, or a certain idealised view of it.
A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, she is committed to bringing her work to a wider audience and has appeared regularly on BBC Radio Three’s Free Thinking Programme as well as at the Hay Literary Festival discussing everything from literary salons to feminism.