Prof Denis Cosgrove

Apr 25 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

ALTHOUGH Liverpool was at the heart of the trading world in the 1950s, Denis Cosgrove’s school had a low opinion of his desire to study geography.

As a top-stream pupil at Saint Francis Xavier’s School, he was told to study Latin and Greek instead. When his mother complained to the headmaster, a Jesuit priest, she was bluntly told that “geography is a girl’s subject”.

Prof Cosgrove, who has died, aged 59, from stomach cancer, traced his passion for geography to a toy globe showing Liverpool as the centre of the mercantile world, and he avidly collected books on the subject. With no car or television, his bank manager father led the family on Sunday walks around Liverpool docks. The freighters unloading their cargoes exuded an alluring air of exotic places like Montevideo and Lagos which the young man found irresistible. Three years of self-study enabled him to take geography A-level, and he pursued the subject at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1969, followed by an MA at Toronto.

The second of six children, his strict Roman Catholic upbringing gave him a mental landscape which looked beyond England to Rome. This led to his later achievements in cultural geography, which assimilated history and iconography into the subject, placing it at the centre of humanities.

Cosgrove returned to Oxford for postgraduate study, and at the Poly gained his doctorate with a thesis on Venetian landscape and became principal lecturer.

Developing a passion for the aesthetic and ethical vision of the towering Victorian savant John Ruskin, he wrote extensively about him. While at Loughborough University, his series of books about Renaissance Italy explored the landscape’s power in historical and geographical settings, such as The Palladian Landscape (1993). More surprisingly, his writing found stimulation, too, in the low-key East Midlands landscape.

After serving as professor of human geography at Royal Holloway College, University of London, he became the first Humboldt Professor of Human Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he wrote the acclaimed Apollo’s Eye (2001), discussing images of the Earth from antiquity to the space age.

His death robbed him of the post of Getty Distinguished Scholar, 2008-9, and a planned work on geography and art in Los Angeles.

Prof Denis Cosgrove, geographer; born, May 3, 1948, died, March 25, 2008