Denis Cosgrove

Biography

Denis Edmund Cosgrove (1948–2008) was a leading cultural geographer whose work reframed landscape, cartography and visual representation as central objects of geographical enquiry. Born in Liverpool and educated at Oxford and Toronto, he taught at Oxford Polytechnic, Loughborough, and Royal Holloway, University of London before holding the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at UCLA. He was founding Editor of Ecumene (launched by Edward Arnold in 1994; retitled Cultural Geographies from 2002), editing it for six years and shaping its cross-disciplinary remit on environment, culture and meaning. He received the Royal Geographical Society's Back Award in 1988 and an honorary doctorate from Tallinn University in 2008.