Through his work on the social and cultural politics of landscape and representation Denis Cosgrove has established an approach to cultural geography that is firmly rooted within the tradition of the humanities. Studying the historical and symbolic meanings of landscape in a Western European tradition that stretches from early Renaissance Italy to the modern world, his main books include 'Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape' (1984), 'The Iconography of Landscape' (1988) and 'The Palladian Landscape' (1993). More recently, he has explored the workings of mapping and cartography in 'Mappings' (1999) and 'Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination' (2001). The following interview conversation, conducted during the Hettner Lecture in Heidelberg on 30th June 2005, aims at offering insights into the interrelations of Denis Cosgrove's biography and his scholarly work. Drawing upon Livingstone's approach of considering the interplay between biography, place and scientific practice in order to achieve a deeper understanding of his oeuvre (Livingstone 2002), we hope that our interview contributes to ongoing discussions on Cosgrove's approach to cultural geography and stimulates an interest in rethinking different ways of practising cultural geography.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Geography and Environment
Published in
Erde
Volume
136
Issue
3
Pages
205 - 216
Citation
FREYTAG, T. and JONS, H., 2005. Vision and the cultural in geography: a biographical interview with Denis Cosgrove. Die Erde - Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin, 136 (3), pp. 205 - 216.
Publisher
Geographical Society
of Berlin and DigiZeitschriften e.V.
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2005
Notes
This article was published in the serial, Die Erde - Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin and is available here with the kind permission of the publisher.