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Download PDF - St. Catherine's College

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GAZETTEupgrading this remarkable synthesis ofarchitectural enterprise, land managementand regional history from a BLitt to a PhD.He refined and amplified it in The PalladianLandscape: geographical change and itscultural representations in sixteenth-centuryItaly (1993).Cosgrove had already broadened his reach toembrace the multi-millennial saga of landscapeas a Western cultural concept. Social Formationand Symbolic Landscape (1984) traced howEuropeans envisaged, discovered and depictedtheir expanding world, in the context ofreligious salvation, political power, economicendeavour, and aesthetic pleasure. His Apollo'sEye: a cartographic genealogy of the Earth inthe Western imagination (2001) chronicledglobal images in maps, charts, paintings,prints, photos and cartoons. EmbracingWestern history from classical Greece andRome, through astronauts' space missionsand satellite images, Cosgrove's magnum opusbraids together the conflicting impulses – tosee the world as a unified whole and to seeit in its fragmented differences, to treasureit intact and to conquer and remake it – thatinform our imaginative gaze."Earthbound humans are unable to embracemore than a tiny part of the planetarysurface", he noted. "But in their imaginationthey can grasp the whole of the earth, andcommunicate and share images of it." Seeingand picturing are as much acts of imaginationas of optical perception; vision must includethe visionary. Space allows only cursorymention of a fraction of Cosgrove's subsequentinfluential work which included: TheIconography of Landscape (1988); Water,Engineering and Landscape (1990); Mappings(1999) – and his University of HeidelbergHettner Lectures, Geographical Imaginationand the Authority of Images (2006). At leastthree books remain to be published, includingGeography and Vision: seeing, imagining andrepresenting the world, 12 scintillating essayson utopian visions, geographical discovery, theshaping of America, conceptions of the Pacific,landscape, masculinity, wilderness, and theastonishing lure of the equator. Geographyand Vision is the quintessence of Cosgrove'slife-long dialogues between "eyewitnessknowledge and interpretation" and the "ideas,hopes and fears of imagined geographies".... Cosgrove traced hisgeographical passion toa toy globe showingLiverpool as the centreof the world ...Born in Liverpool, Cosgrove traced hisgeographical passion to a toy globe showingLiverpool as the centre of the world, whilethe ships in Liverpool's great docks held thepromise of exotic realms to be experienced.Following his undergraduate degree at<strong>St</strong> <strong>Catherine's</strong>, Oxford, in 1969 and an MA atToronto in 1971, Cosgrove returned to Oxfordfor postgraduate study, and worked as lecturerand senior lecturer at Oxford Polytechnic.In 1980 he became senior lecturer and thenreader at Loughborough University, beforemoving to Royal Holloway, University ofLondon, as Professor of Human Geographyfrom 1994 to 1999 and becoming Dean of theGraduate School in 1998-99. The followingyear, he gained the inaugural Alexander vonHumboldt Chair in Geography at the Universityof California, Los Angeles, being designatedhead of department just before hisfinal illness.Deeply engaged with architectural and arthistory, landscape design, and the visual media,Cosgrove conceived and curated the AshmoleanMuseum exhibition on John Ruskin in 2000. Heheld visiting appointments at the universities ofToronto, Oregon, and Texas. Myriad academicservice posts and research training programmescomplemented his devotion to teaching andguiding scores of postgraduate students fromall over the world. He advised and participatedST CATHERINE’S COLLEGE 2008/63

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