Books

Single-author books

• Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
  • Science Fiction Studies review: ‘important and valuable’; ‘cogent and compelling’; a ‘deeply researched and effectively argued study’
  • Orbit review: there is ‘richness of … discussion of the social/political/historical context of the 1980s’; makes ‘innovative correlations … between texts’
  • BSLS review: ‘successfully captures the intriguing nuances of the nuclear age’
• States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester University Press, 2008)
  • Technology and Culture review: ‘insightful and compelling’
  • BSLS review: ‘a brilliant analysis of North American literature during the Cold War’
  • Modern Fiction Studies review: opens up ‘rich, important pathways for future nuclear criticism’
• Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate (Ashgate, 1999)

Co-edited books

• Bunker: Stories and Poems from a Nuclear Age (Five Leaves, 2024), co-edited with Sarah Jackson
  • Features fiction and poetry, emerging from a visit to Nottingham’s abandoned bunker, by critically acclaimed writers Zayneb Allak, Hannah Cooper-Smithson, Daniel Cordle, Anthony Cropper, Ailbhe Darcy, Jay Gao, Maria Gil Ulldemolins, Delphine Grass, Jonathan Hogg, Helena Hunter, Phil Leonard, Jon McGregor, and Andrew Taylor, and photographs by Martine Hamilton-Knight
• Writing the Contemporary: Poetry and Postcards from UNESCO Cities of Literature (Trent Editions, 2019), co-edited with Jo Dixon
  • Brings together the work of three European poets to explore themes of home, technology and environment. Framed with postcards from other writers and expert introductions, the collection reflects on the challenges of the twenty-first century moment.
  • Available in e-book and hard copy.

Creative Work

• ‘Once More, With Feeling,’ Ragaire Literary Magazine, issue 5 (2026) – short story
• ‘Surface Tension,’ New Nottingham Journal, issue 1 (2025) – short story
  • previously highly commended in the Manchester Writing Prize (2017)
• ‘Etcetera: Annotations to the Counter Room Inventory’ – short fiction
  • Part of Bunker: Stories and Poems from a Nuclear Age (Five Leaves, 2024)
• ‘In Sure and Certain Hope‘ – short story
  • Winner of the East Midlands Prize in the 2022 Aurora international writing competition

Journalism

• ‘Oppenheimer: Six Other Depictions of the ‘Father of the Atom Bomb’ on Page, Stage and Screen’, The Conversation (20 July, 2023)
• ‘Long After Midnight: On Our New Nuclear Fears’, Expert Blog, Nottingham Trent University (2 March, 2022)
• ‘This is What Happened the Morning the First Atomic Bomb Created a New World’, The Conversation (15 July, 2020)
• ‘Hiroshima’s Literary Legacy: The Blinding Flash That Changed the World Forever’, The Conversation (6 August, 2015)
• ‘Are You Ready for the Terror Drill?’, Guardian (22 March, 2005)

Book chapters

• ‘What Might Be Going to Have Been: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, Postmodernism, and the Late Cold War’, in Art Redding (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2026), pp. 185-97.
• ‘Science Fiction in the Atomic Age’, in Glyn Morgan (ed.), Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination (Thames & Hudson, 2022), pp. 222-41
• ‘The Politics of Vulnerability: Nuclear Peril and the Global Imagination’, in Andrew Hammond (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 143-61
• ‘Climate Criticism and Nuclear Criticism’, in Adeline Johns-Putra (ed.), Climate and Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 281-97
• ‘Legacy Waste: Nuclear Culture After the Cold War’, in Michael Blouin et al, The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World (Cambridge Scholars, 2014), pp. 230-49
• ‘Beyond the Apocalypse of Closure: Nuclear Anxiety in Postmodern Literature of the United States’, in Andrew Hammond (ed.), Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (Routledge, 2006), pp. 63-77
• ‘States of Being, Not Being in States: Metaphysical Border Crossings in the Work of Milan Kundera’, in Sharon Ouditt (ed.), Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture (Ashgate, 2002), pp. 128-37
• ‘Resisting Decadence: Literary Criticism as a Corrective to Low Culture and High Science in the Work of I.A. Richards’, in Michael St John, Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture (Ashgate, 1999), pp. 171-82

Journal articles

• ‘Introduction: The Literature of the Anthropocene’ (with Diletta De Cristofaro), C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 6.1 (2018), p. 1
• ‘Sciences / Humans / Humanities: Dexter Masters’ The Accident and Being in the Nuclear Age’, Journals of Literature and Science 10.2 (2017), pp. 74-87
• ‘Contemporary Studies Network Roundtable: Responding to Robert Macfarlane’s Generation Anthropocene‘ (with Rachel Sykes et al, in Open Library of the Humanities Journal 3.1 (2017), online
• ‘The Futures of Nuclear Criticism’, Alluvium: 21st-Century Writing, 21st-Century Approaches 5.4, online
• ‘”That’s Going to Happen to Us. It is”: Threads and the Imagination of Nuclear Disaster on 1980s Television’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 45.1 (2013), pp. 71-92
• ‘Protect/Protest: British Nuclear Fiction of the 1980s’, The British Journal for the History of Science 45.4 (2012), pp. 653-69
  • Journal of Literature and Science Review: ‘an excellent analysis’; ‘a fine article’; ‘Cordle skilfully outlines an area of British literary studies that has otherwise been overlooked’
• ‘”Do Not Leave Your Homes”: Containment Culture and Its Fallout in Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth‘, Cultural Politics 4.3 (2008), pp. 337-50
• ‘In Dreams, in Imagination: Suspense, Anxiety and the Cold War in Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age‘, Critical Survey 19.2 (2007), pp. 101-20
• ‘Introductions I and II: “Writing” and “Technologies”‘, Writing Technologies (2007), online.
• ‘Cultures of Terror: Nuclear Criticism During and Since the Cold War’, Literature Compass 3.6 (2006), pp. 1186-99
• ‘Changing of the Old Guard: Time Travel and Literary Technique in the Work of Kurt Vonnegut’, The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000), pp. 166-76

Academic editorial work

• Writing the Contemporary: Poetry and Postcards from UNESCO Cities of Literature (Trent Editions, 2019) – co-edited with Jo Dixon
  • A product of our Re:Vision project, in which we worked with established and aspiring writers in workshops at several UNESCO European Cities of Literature, this book collects poems and critical reflection on home and belonging, technology, and the environment
  • Available in e-book and hard copy.
• Special edition on the literature of the Anthropocene for C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings 6.1 (2018)
• With Phil Leonard, I was founder and co-editor of the online journal Writing Technologies, which ran from 2007-2015.