DENIS E. COSGROVE

Professor

Mailing Address:
Department of Geography
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1524

Office: 1170 Bunche Hall, UCLA
Phone: (310) 825-1912
Fax: (310) 206-5976
e.mail: cosgrove@geog.ucla.edu

Curriculum Vitae:

• BA St Catherine's College Oxford
• MA University of Toronto
• Dphil Oxford

Research Interests

My work has evolved from a focus on the meanings of landscape in Human and Cultural Geography, especially as these have evolved in Western Europe since the fifteenth century, to a broader concern with the role of spatial images and representations in the making and communicating of knowledge. I am especially interested in the role played by visual images in shaping geographical imaginations and thus in the connections between Geography as a formal discipline and imaginative expressions of geographical knowledge and experience in the visual arts (including cartography).

This broad concern has been pursued through a series of focussed studies: of landscape transformation, design and images in sixteenth-century Venice and north Italy, of landscape writings by authors such as John Ruskin, of landscape, space and performance in twentieth century Rome, of cosmography in early modern Europe (1450-1650), and of the history of Western imaginings of the globe and whole earth. I have also written extensively on theory in Cultural Geography and edited for six years the journal Ecumene which publishes cross-disciplinary work on environment, culture and meaning.

Teaching

Undergraduate:

• Introduction to Cultural Geography
• Images of the Earth
• Culture and Environment in the Modern World (seminar)

Graduate:

• Seminar in Cultural Geography

Selected Publications

Mappings (editor) 311 pp. Reaktion Books, London, 1999

Social formation and Symbolic Landscape (2nd edition with additional introductory chapter), Wisconsin Univ. Press, 1998

The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth century Italy 287 pp. Leicester University Press/Pennsylvanian State U.P., 1993 [currently being translated into Italian by Cierre, Verona]

"Global illumination and enlightenment in the geographies of Vincenzo Coronelli and Athanasius Kircher" in C.Withers & D.Livingstone eds. Enlightenment Geographies, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2000, 33-66.

"Millennial geographics" (with L.Martins) Annals, Association of American Geographers 90. 1, 2000 (forthcoming)

"Urban rhetoric and embodied identities: city, nation and empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome 1870-1945" (with D. Atkinson) Annals, Association of American Geographers, 88, 1, 1998, 28-49.

"Cultural Landscapes" in T.Unwin ed. Europe: a modern geography, Longman, London, 1997, 65-81.

"Liminal geometry and elemental landscape: construction and representation" in J. Corner (ed.) Recovering Landscape Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton NJ, 1999, 103-120.

"Airport/Landscape" in J. Corner (ed.) Recovering Landscape Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton NJ, 1999, 221-232 (with paintings by Adrian Hemming)

"Empire in modern Rome: shaping and remembering an imperial city" (with D.Atkinson and A.Notaro), in F.Driver & D.Gilbert (eds.) Imperial Cities: landscape, display, identity. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, 40-63.

"La geographie culturelle et la signification du millenaire" Geographie et Cultures, 31, 1999, 49-64.

Apollo's canvas: a cosmographic genealogy of Western imaginings of the globe and whole earth Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (in press)