Dr Timothy Cooper
Research Interests
Waste, Risk and Environment
My main research project is an investigation of the history of waste, both as category of thought and as material culture. I am interested in the contested meanings of 'waste' in modernity and its deployment to legitimate capitalist ecological transformations, as well as the contradictions of wasting in everyday life. Publications from this research can be viewed using Exeter's institutional repository ERIC, including my most recent article, 'Peter Lund Simmonds and the Political Ecology of Waste Utilization in Victorian Britain', published in Technology and Culture in 2011.
British Environmental Politics
I am developing a research project on the history of 'environmentalism' in Britain, and particularly the extent of popular participation in the making of modern environmentalism and environmental justice movements. On ERIC you can read a version my article on the politics of post-war recycling, 'War on Waste? The Politics of Waste and Recycling in Post-war Britain, 1950-1975', originally published in Capitalism Nature Socialism in 2009.
British Popular Politics and Radicalism
My original research field was British political history, and I have a continuing research and teaching interest in popular politics in nineteenth-century Britain; I have published on the suburbanization of metropolitan radicalism in the later nineteeth century. You can read a version of my chapter 'The Politics of the Working-class Suburb: Walthamstow 1870-1910' on ERIC.
Recent Conference Papers:
- 'Public health and environmental risk: contesting refuse disposal in Britain 1920- 1939', IHR Anglo-American Conference of Historians, 'Health in History', 2011
- 'Waste and the political ecology of Victorian Britain', IHR Anglo-American Conference of Historians, 'Environments', 2010
- 'Critical perspectives from Marxism on the uses of waste and recycling in the long-eighteenth century', Recycling Luxury and Waste, Paris Diderot-University, 2010
- 'Recycling modernity: towards an environmental history of waste', History Compass Online Conference, 2009
- 'Disposable ecologies: waste and the Victorian ecological imaginary', BAVS/NAVSA Joint Meeting, University of Cambridge; Engineering Space, University of St Andrews, 2009
- 'Waste and the political ecology of Victorian capital', Historical Materialism Sixth Annual Conference, 2009
- 'Completing the refuse revolution: the politics of controlled tipping in Britain, 1920-1960', Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, 2008
- 'Recycling capitalism: the political economy of waste in Victorian Britain', Economic History Society Annual Conference, 2008
Research Grants
- 2010-2011, 'Refuse tipping, exposure and risk in twentieth-century Britain, 1919-1939', Wellcome Trust
- 2011-2013, 'Catastrophe, Community and Environment: The Impact of the Torrey Canyon Oil Disaster on Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly', British Academy
Research Supervision
I am happy to offer research supervision in the fields of global environmental history, environmentalism and environmental politics, and the history of technology and the environment.
Research Students
Annabel Banks (second supervisor, 2011-) Performing the Archive
