Cosgrove, Denis (1948–2008)

Denis Cosgrove was a prolific cultural geographer who is best known for his profound impacts in the field of landscape studies. In broad terms, his work dealt with issues of subjectivity, representation, and the imbrication of power and knowledge. Cosgrove connected geographic research with the arts and humanities, providing significant insights regarding the geographic imagination and representation of knowledge, especially within the practices of landscape depiction and mapping. In 1993, Cosgrove cofounded the journal Ecumene: A Geographical Journal of Environment, Culture, and Meaning (now Cultural Geographies), a significant forum within the field. He became the inaugural Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1999. Cosgrove's contributions are associated with the “new” cultural geography, or cultural turn, and the “crisis of representation.”

Working from historical and empirical details grounded in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, Cosgrove's work in cultural landscape studies focused on landscape as a “way of seeing” that represents and orders the world and humanity's relation to it. Cosgrove placed emphasis on the ways symbolic landscapes worked to order class relations and maintain social hierarchy. Since landscape may be understood as a culturally and historically specific construction, embedded with processes of social formation and naturalizing a particular social order, Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels advocated a methodology based on iconography. Iconography seeks to uncover and interpret symbolic meanings and make visible the ideology inherent in representations. These methods have been influential, especially to geographers working in various visual forms, including feminist geographers, who have explored and modified methods based on the principles of iconography.

During the 1990s, Cosgrove shifted emphasis to explore issues of representation in mapping and cartography and to deal with broader issues of cosmology and cosmography. This period is perhaps exemplified by his analysis of images from the Apollo mission, examining the impact of visualizing the whole of Earth from space.

Cosgrove's influence is widely acknowledged. He was an important contributor to the body of work that became known as the new cultural geography, drawing on social and cultural theory. Cosgrove and Mona Domosh helped develop the critique that became known as the crisis of geographical representation while expanding scholarly engagements with issues of authorship and authority. Through his long line of inquiry in the geographic imagination, Cosgrove's work was informed by and helped connect diverse scholarly fields, among them art history, cartographic history, and landscape architecture.