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Dr David Cooper
Department: English and Creative Writing
Degree: BA (Liverpool); PhD (Lancaster)
Associated research centres and groups: Wordsworth Centre
Current Teaching
In 2010/11, David will be Co-Director of Part I Studies in the Department of English & Creative Writing and will be teaching on 'Introduction to English Literature' (ENGL100). Please do not hesitate to contact him if you have any questions regarding Part I Studies; feel free to send him an e-mail and/or drop in to see him during his weekly Part I office hour.
At Part II, David will be teaching on 'The Theory and Practice of Criticism' (201)' and 'British Romanticism' (207); and he will lecture on 'American Literature to 1900' (204).
Research Interests
David's research focuses on what could be broadly defined as literary geographies: the ways in which creative writers (particularly poets) think geographically; and the ways in which different strands of spatial theory can open up new readings of the textual representation of landscape and environment. This interdisciplinary research currently moves between three overlapping areas of interest: first-generation Romanticism (Wordsworth and Coleridge); post-war/contemporary British and Irish poetry; and the cultural geography of the Lake District. David is currently working on two intersecting projects. The first is a critical monograph - Rewriting the Lakes: Spaces, Places, Traces - which brings together theories of space (including phenomenology, critical cartography, spatial theology and 'more-than-representational' thinking) and intertextuality to explore the literary representation of the Lake District in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second is Poetry & Geography: Space and Place in Post-War Poetry: a collection of new essays on both canonical and neglected British and Irish writers co-edited with Neal Alexander (University of Nottingham).
David has an additional, and developing, interest in digital humanities; and, more specifically, the conceptual and critical possibilities of using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to map out cultural representations of space and place. These ideas were provisionally explored - with Dr Ian Gregory, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities - in the British Academy-funded pilot project, 'Mapping the Lakes: A Literary GIS', which focused on topographic texts by Thomas Gray and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As a result of this project, he was a founding member of an AHRC-funded network which brought together scholars from different institutions (University of Liverpool; University of Nottingham; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Lancaster University), and from different disciplines, with a shared interest in cultural mapping. He is currently working on a series of interrelated projects exploring the scholarly, pedagogic and knowledge transfer potential of the use of digital (especially mobile) technologies to present, and to reflect upon,the cultural layering of landscape.
A former Arts Officer at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, and Literature Development Officer for the City of York, David has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the Universities of Salford and Cumbria and is an Associate of the Higher Education Academy. He reviews for the international Digital Humanities conference and the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. He also sits on the editorial board of the Centre for North-West Regional Studies at Lancaster University and is the current Chair of the Norman Nicholson Society.
Forthcoming & Recent Publications:
'Literary Cartography: Writers, Places, Texts, Maps & Readers', in Mapping Culture(s): Place, Practice and Performance, ed. by Julia Hallam, Les Roberts and Ryan Shand (2012)
'Mapping Deep Topography: An Interview with Iain Sinclair' (with Les Roberts), in Mapping Culture(s): Place, Practice and Performance, ed. by Julia Hallam, Les Roberts and Ryan Shand (2012)
'Moving and Mapping: Sean Borodale and the Practice of Environmental Note-taking', Studies in Travel Writing (2011)
'Mapping the English Lake District: A Literary GIS' (with Ian N. Gregory), Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2011) [in press]
'Thomas Gray, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geographical Information Systems: A Literary GIS of Two Lake District Tours' (with Ian N. Gregory), International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, 3 (2009), 61-84
'"Matter Matters": Topographical and Theological Space in the Poetry of Norman Nicholson', Yearbook of English Studies, 39 (2009), 169-85
'The Poetics of Place and Space: Wordsworth, Norman Nicholson and the Lake District', Literature Compass, 5 (2008), 807-21
'Planning Live Events', Living Writers in the Curriculum: A Good Practice Guide, ed. by Vicki Bertram and Andrew Maunder (London: The English Subject Centre, 2005), 16-20
Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database
David Cooper has 2 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk
Cooper, D. C. (2005) Planning live events. In: Living writers in the curriculum : a good practice guide. English Subject Centre report series (11). The English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, Egham, pp. 16-20. ISBN 0902194143
Associated Keywords: Contemporary literature, Ecology, Environment, Environmental arts, Environmental philosophy, Geographical information systems, Geographic information systems, GIS, Lake District, Literature, Literature and location, Phenomenology, Place-writing, Poetry, Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Spatiality, Wordsworth
Contact Details
Tel: +44 (0)1524
Room:
- FASS Intranet -
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD
United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510851
Fax: +44 (0) 1524 510857
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