DANIEL CORDLE
Daniel Cordle is a freelance writer and researcher, specializing in the literature and culture of the nuclear age. In a long academic career, he developed an international reputation for his work on nuclear culture. His first book on the topic, States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester University Press, 2007) explores the ways in which US literature is shaped by unresolved anticipation of potential nuclear futures and how this manifests in depictions of homes, cities, and the planet. A later book, Late Cold Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s, examines the resurgence of nuclear fears in the final decade of the Cold War and the complex relation between these and contemporary debates about gender, the environment, and neoliberalism. He is the author of numerous journal articles and chapters in edited collections, as well as some journalism. He is currently working on a book on the literature of Los Alamos and the making of the atomic bomb.
In recent years his work has been shaped by an interest in the potential for creative research. His book, co-edited with Sarah Jackson, Bunker: Stories and Poems from a Nuclear Age (Five Leaves, 2024), is the outcome of a project in which they took acclaimed writers and experts into the Nottingham War Rooms, an abandoned UK nuclear bunker that would have been a Regional Seat of Government, housing over 400 people, in the event of nuclear war.
