Denis Cosgrove

British cultural geographer and professor

Denis Edmund Cosgrove (3 May 1948 – 21 March 2008) was a British cultural geographer. He taught at Oxford Polytechnic, Loughborough University, Royal Holloway, University of London, where he rose to become dean of the graduate school, and finally at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1998, he received the prestigious Back Award from the Royal Geographical Society.

Cosgrove was born and raised in Liverpool, the second eldest of six children. His father, a bank manager and devout Roman Catholic, was very active in his upbringing, sending him to the Jesuit school he had himself attended, St Francis Xavier's College, Liverpool. He won an open scholarship to read geography at St Catherine's College, Oxford. He graduated in 1969, going on to complete an MA in Geography at the University of Toronto. After marrying his first wife in New York, he returned to the University of Oxford to do a doctorate with a "head full of new ideas", but with little academic support, and left to take a job "up the hill" as Lecturer at Oxford Polytechnic in 1972. Meanwhile, his thesis on Venetian landscape was submitted for a Bachelor of Letters (BLitt) degree, only to be successfully resubmitted for a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) degree in 1976 on the insistence of its examiner, David Lowenthal, who considered it an outstanding piece of work. In 1970, Cosgrove married Isobel Thubron; they had two daughters and later divorced. This broad concern was pursued through a series of focussed studies: of landscape transformation, design and images in 16th century Venice and north Italy, of landscape writings by authors such as John Ruskin, of landscape, space and performance in 20th century Rome, of cosmography in early modern Europe (1450–1650), and of the history of Western imaginings of the globe and whole earth. He has also written extensively on theory in cultural geography and edited for six years the journal Ecumene (now titled Cultural Geographies) which publishes cross disciplinary work on environment, culture and meaning. Within his cultural research, Cosgrove differentiated between dominant cultures and alternative cultures. The dominant culture has the most influence in shaping a landscape. Most of what you see, he claimed, is likely to be a product of the dominant culture in a region. However, one is also likely to see evidence of alternative, or subcultures in the landscape. Within the category of alternative culture, Cosgrove differentiated between residual cultures (historic cultures that have disappeared or are in the process of fading away), emergent cultures (those that are just now appearing), and excluded cultures (those that are actively or passively excluded by the dominant culture).

In February 2008, Cosgrove was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tallinn University., having previously been awarded the prestigious Back Award from the Royal Geographical Society in 1988. He delivered the influential Hettner Lectures in 2005.