Daniel Cook
Assistant Professor of English
English Dept. Assistant Chair
Ph.D. in English, University of California, Davis, 2005
M.F.A. in creative writing, fiction, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, 1999
B.A. in English, Cedarville College, 1997
Daniel Cook specializes in nineteenth-century British literature, with an emphasis on Victorian narratives of identity and self-transformation. His essay "Froude's Post-Christian Apostate and the Uneven Development of Unbelief" (Religion and Literature 2006), traces a series of Victorian legends about how skepticism can insidiously unravel the selfhood of the unwitting intellectual. The essay "Bodies of Scholarship" (forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture) discusses the late-Victorian obsession with the gentleman's library, whose book-laden shelves were imagined as the necessary physical evidence of an ineffable, inward journey. Most recently, Daniel has finished a chapter on the relationship between H.G. Wells's utopian writings and literary modernism, and is researching a book on the connection between Victorian novels and Victorian sermons. This most recent project will deal with famous fictional scenes of preaching in books like Wuthering Heights and Moby Dick, as well as with preacher-novelists like John Henry Newman, Charles Kingsley, and George MacDonald.
Daniel teaches a number of core literature program courses, including Introduction to Literary Studies (201), Writing Interpretive Papers (301), and Literature of Britain and the U.S. 1660-1865 (312), as well as such special topics courses as Great Experiments in Modern Fiction (336), Note to Self: Writing Lives in Nineteenth-Century Britain (431), and Twentieth-Century British Fiction and the Nightmare of History (434). His courses generally take an historical approach, but also attempt to honor the subtleties that make books like Middlemarch and In Memoriam irreducibly unique.
When Daniel is not teaching, researching, and writing, he is enduring the rural idyll of Corunna, Michigan, alongside his fiancée, Stephanie. He and Stephanie enjoy good company, cheap wine, international travel, such TV shows as Pardon the Interruption and Iron Chef, and such bands as U2, The National, and I Am the Branch (a local band headlined by former SVSU English majors Robbie Pieschke and Tyler Germain). Daniel is also an avid rock climber, training at Planet Rock (Pontiac, Michigan) and testing his resolve at such famous sites as Red River Gorge, Kentucky and the Batu Caves of Malaysia.
Favorite Undergraduate Memory: Repeatedly debating about the existence of God with my roommates until 4 a.m., then falling blissfully asleep in my 8 a.m. sociology class.
Favorite moment at SVSU: Getting a job offer, and becoming fully aware of the fact that people were actually going to pay me to talk about books.
Five books Daniel would want with him if marooned on a deserted island: 1) The Brothers Karamazov, 2) Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3) Middlemarch, 4) Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca, 5) Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson