Dr Timothy Cooper

Extension: 01326 253760

Telephone: 01392 2601326 253760

Lecturer

Research

I have research interests in the fields of global environmental and British political history.

The primary focus of my research is an ongoing project on the history of waste. Viewed both as an environmental issue and as a category of thought, 'waste' offers a way of exploring some of the foundational assumptions that grounded the ecological practices of modernity. My research challenges representations of waste as an environmental problem that is subject to simple technological solutions. Rather, I seek to show how the idea of 'waste' underpined discourses that enabled past environmental transformations. My work seeks to explore the various ways in which a discourse of 'waste' supports the capitalist transformation and management of nature.

My second area of research interest is the history of English radical politics. My Ph.D. Thesis was entitled 'The politics of Radicalism in suburban Walthamstow, 1870-1914'. I am currently writing a monograph which draws on material from the thesis in order to explore the survival of radicalism in metropolitan suburbia in 1880s and 1890s, and the deployment of 'place' within the late-Victorian political imagination.

Teaching

I teach courses on environmental history and the history of English radicalism at the Cornwall Campus of Exeter University. I also co-ordinate the first-year module 'Introduction to World History', which is taught in Cornwall.