Dr David Cooper

Building upon my professional background in literature development, a commitment to public engagement underpins my interdisciplinary and creative-critical research. Meaningful impact is also integral to the strategic vision of the Centre for Place Writing.

PLACE 2020 and 2021

In 2020, the Centre for Place Writing was launched with PLACE 2020: an online collection – edited by Rachel Lichtenstein and myself - in which leading and emerging creative practitioners, from around the world, were invited to reflect on what ‘place’ meant to them at that particular moment in time. A second collection followed in 2021.

Interdisciplinary Research Projects

As a Co-Investigator on the ‘Voices of the Future’ project, Christopher Hanley (Education, Manchester Met) and I are working with English teachers in local schools and colleges to explore how thinking about Manchester’s treescapes might be incorporated into a place-based secondary school curriculum.

I was also a Co-Investigator on ‘Chronotopic Cartographies for Literature’: a major, multi-institution project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Sally Bushell (Lancaster University).

Creative-Critical Collaborations

Alongside my literary geographical work, I have been involved in a range of creative-critical collaborations involving visual artists, musicians, and environmental scientists. These include:

• ‘Unpublished Tour’ (2021): a collaborative project – led by Irene Rogan, and funded by Arts Council England – that brought together artists, writers, and scientists to explore the Duddon Estuary in south-west Cumbria.
• ‘Hayling Island: Stories at Sea Level’ (2017-18): an experimental project – led by Mish Green and funded by Arts Council England - that involved multi-media performance at Durham and Manchester Literature Festivals, as well as Hayling Library.
• ‘Made in Translation’ (2017): a collaboration with the textile artist, Lesley Raven, to contribute to a multi-media exhibition curated by Alice Kettle and held at the Portico Library, Manchester.
• ‘Practising Places: Creative & Critical Reflections on Place’ (2016-19): a collaboration with the visual artist, Amelia Crouch, as part of a programme organised by In Certain Places, University of Central Lancashire.

Curation of Events

I have programmed and hosted a wide range of public events that connect with my research interests and my role as Co-Director of the Centre for Place Writing. These include:

• Rewriting the North (2019- ): a series of author events organised to celebrate the biannual Portico Prize. I have acted as an academic consultant for the Portico Library’s Rewriting the North podcast series.  
• Writing Place: Creative-Critical Conversations: a series of interdisciplinary seminars co-organised with Sarah Butler and held at Manchester Met.
• Place Writing Festival (2017): I directed a major two-day festival held at Manchester Met.
• Digital Re-Enchantment: Place, Writing & Technology (2016): two-day Humanities in Public event, Great Hucklow, Peak District.

Public Talks/Readings

I have been invited to deliver public talks at a wide range of venues including the British Library, Whitworth Art Gallery, and the Wordsworth Trust.

Current Funded Projects

• Co-Investigator, ‘Voices of the Future: Collaborating with Children & Young People to Re-Imagine Treescapes’ (2021-24): led by Kate Pahl (Manchester Met) as part of the major Future of UK Treescapes programme co-ordinated by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in partnership with several other funding bodies.
   

Previous Funded Projects Include:

• Co-Investigator, ‘Chronotopic Cartographies for Literature’ (2017-20): led by Sally Bushell (Lancaster University) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
• International Co-Investigator, ‘Literary Geographies of Testimony’ (2015): led by Sheila Hones (University of Tokyo) and funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
• Senior Research Associate, ‘Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places’ (2011-12): led by Ian Gregory (Lancaster University) and funded by the European Research Council.

Undergraduate Teaching

Since joining the Department of English at Manchester Met, I have enjoyed teaching on a wide range of undergraduate units including: Approaches to Narrative; Metropolis; Enlightenment to Romanticism; and Post-war to the Present. I have also enjoyed supervising final-year Critical Projects on diverse topic and, in 2016, I was delighted to be shortlisted for Undergraduate Supervisor of the Year in the MMU Union Teaching Awards.

I have also designed ‘Writing & Place’: a final-year unit that I lead and that explores, through critical and/or creative practice, the role of ‘place’ in contemporary literary culture.

Postgraduate Teaching

Over recent years, much of my postgraduate teaching has focused on the Creative Non-Fiction pathway on the Writing School’s MA/MFA in Creative Writing.

Postgraduate Supervision

I have a passionate commitment to reflecting on, and improving, the experience of postgraduate researchers and I am proud that we now have twenty PhD students associated with the Centre for Place Writing.

I have supervised the following PhD researchers to the successful completion of their projects:

• Richard Skelton, ‘North of Here: Imagining the Human and Other-than-Human in Late-Upper Palaeolithic Britain’ (2021)
• Zaffar Kunial, ‘Fromwards: Wavering between Beginnings’ (2019)
• Jennifer Bailey, ‘For Rochdale: Reading, Mapping, and Writing Place’ (2018)

I am currently on the supervisory teams for the following PGRs at Manchester Met:

• Virgina Astley, ‘Singing Places of the Upper Reaches: Exploring Deep Resonance on the River Thames’ (2020 - )
• Sally Baker,
• Natalie Burdett, ‘Writing the West Midlands: a GeoHumanities Approach to the Poetry of Place’ (2016 - )
• Yasmin Chopin, ‘Memorial Benches: A Cultural Marker in the Landscape’ (2021 - )
• Sarah Jasmon, ‘Writing Manchester’s Canals into Place’ (2017 - )
• Michelle Ravenscroft, ‘The Portico Library and the Collection: History, Culture, Identity and Reading the North 1806-1930’ (2021 - )
• Jane Samuels, ‘The Valley of Mardale: A Deep Mapping of a Post-Traumatic Landscape’ (2021 - )
• Isabel Taube, ‘Granadaland: the Histories and Legacies of the Granada Television Company’ (2017 - )

In addition, I am also the Third Supervisor for Rebecca Goldsmith (Keele University) who is working with Writing West Midlands on an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral project.

Please find below a list of selected publications:

Books:

N. Alexander & D. Cooper (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies (London: Routledge, 2023)

D. Cooper, C. Donaldson & P. Murrieta-Flores, Literary Mapping in the Digital Age, ed. by D. Cooper, C. Donaldson & P. Murrieta-Flores (London: Routledge, 2016). Indonesian translation to be published by Airlannga University Press in 2022.

D. Cooper & N. Alexander (eds), Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in Post-war Poetry, ed. by N. Alexander & D. Cooper (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013)

Journal Articles

Book Chapters (Critical Writing)

D. Cooper, ‘The Problem of Precedent: Mapping the Post-Romantic Lake District’, in S. Bushell et al, eds, Romantic Cartographies: Mapping, Literature, Culture, 1789-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 252-70.

D. Cooper, ‘Creative Engagements with Place’, in T. Edensor et al, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Place (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 615-24. I also had editorial responsibility for Part VII of the Handbook: 9 chapters exploring ‘Creative Engagements with Place’.

D. Cooper, ‘Contemporary British Place Writing: Towards a Definition’, in T. Edensor et al, eds, The Routledge Handbook of Place (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 634-43.

D. Cooper, ‘Digital Literary Geographies: Mapping British Romanticism’, in R. T. Tally Jr, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 135-47.

D. Cooper, ‘“Setting the Globe to Spin”: Digital Mapping and Contemporary Literary Culture’, in D. Cooper et al, eds, Literary Mapping in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 276-95.

D. Cooper, C. Donaldson & P. Murrieta-Flores, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Literary Mapping’, in D. Cooper et al, eds, Literary Mapping in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 1-21.

I. N. Gregory, D. Cooper, A. Hardie & P. Rayson, ‘Spatializing and Analyzing Digital Texts: Corpora, GIS, and Places’, in D. J. Bodenhamer et al, eds, Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 150-78.

D. Cooper, ‘The Post-Industrial Picturesque?: Placing and Promoting Marginalized Millom’, in J. K. Walton & J. Wood, eds, The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination, 1750-2010 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 241-62.

D. Cooper, ‘Envisioning “the cubist fells”: Ways of Seeing in the Poetry of Norman Nicholson’, in N. Alexander & D. Cooper, eds, Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in Post-war Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 148-60.

N. Alexander & D. Cooper, ‘Introduction’, in Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in Post-war Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 1-18.

D. Cooper, ‘Critical Literary Cartography: Texts, Maps and a Coleridge Notebook’, in L. Roberts, ed., Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 29-52.

Creative-Critical Writing

D.Cooper, ‘The Duddon Estuary: the Myriad Lines of its Relations’ (pamphlet from Unpublished Tour, 2021).  

D. Cooper & M. Green, ‘Confounding Cartography: The Sandscape Diminution of Hayling Island’, in J. Carruthers & N. Dakkak, eds, Sandscapes: Writing the British Seaside (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 191-207.

D. Cooper & A. Crouch, ‘The Cul-de-Sac in the Forest: the Supermodernity of Center Parcs’, in E. Speight, ed., Practising Place: Creative and Critical Reflections on Place (Sunderland: Art Editions, 2019), pp. 72-89.

D. Cooper, ‘Sky-tower as Icon’ & ‘The Extraterrestrial Lighthouse: St John’s Beacon, Liverpool’, in V. Strang et al, eds, From the Lighthouse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Light (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 96-8 & pp. 137-8.

D. Cooper, ‘Telegraph Hill’, in T. Chivers & M. Kratz, eds, Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City (London: Penned in the Margins, 2014), pp. 147-56.

Other

D. Cooper & R. Lichtenstein (eds), PLACE 2021 (2021)

D. Cooper & R. Lichtenstein (eds), PLACE 2020 (2020)

D. Cooper, ‘Foreword’ to S. Leach, Twenty Football Towns (Salford: Saraband, 2020), pp. i-v.

D. Cooper, ‘A Long Look: Henry Iddon’s Forton Stories’, The Modernist Magazine (2020), pp. 54-59.

D. Cooper, ‘9DHU’, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place (2019) [https://www.elsewhere-journal.com/blog/tag/David+Cooper]

D. Cooper, ‘Sounds & Silences: Acoustic Geographies & the Poetry of Place’, in H. Mort, The Singing Glacier (London: Hercules Editions, 2018), pp. 36-39.

D. Cooper, ‘Not Disqualifyingly Timid Pseudopodia Extend and Coalesce; or Mary Somerville at the Portico’, in A. Kettle (ed.), Made in Translation (Manchester: MMU, 2017), pp. 22-24.

D. Cooper & L. Roberts, ‘Walking, Witnessing, Mapping: An Interview with Iain Sinclair’, in L. Roberts, ed., Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 85-100.

2020 ‘Place Writing in a Pandemic’ (with Rachel Lichtenstein), The Bookseller.

My recent research and/or the work of the Centre for Place Writing has also featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Open Country, Countryfile Magazine, Country Walking, and Print magazine (New York).

I can also be found on Twitter @DrDavid Cooper and @PlaceCentre