Denis Cosgrove has died at his home in Los Angeles on 21st March 2008, in his sixtieth year. Denis was Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway from 1994 to 1999, and has been a Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway since 2000, in which capacity he returned to teach every year until 2007. He directed the Social and Cultural Geography Group at Royal Holloway, and designed our MA programme in Cultural Geography (Research). He was Dean of Royal Holloway's Graduate School from 1998, immediately prior to his appointment to the Alexander Von Humboldt Chair at UCLA in 2000.

Denis Cosgrove was one of the world’s leading cultural geographers, and his writings have had a significant impact on geographers in many parts of the world over the last thirty years. He was founding editor of the journal Cultural Geographies, since edited by Phil Crang and Tim Cresswell, also based at Royal Holloway. Denis Cosgrove’s work on landscape shaped the ideas of a generation of scholars in geography and landscape architecture; his historical and contemporary writings on the arts of mapping helped to bring new life to the study of cartography; and his research on images of the globe in the Western tradition (including a brilliant essay on the first photographs of the earth from space) is today regarded in the highest terms.

Denis Cosgrove won numerous prizes and accolades, including the Royal Geographical Society’s Back Award, and his work has been widely translated. Aside from his writings themselves, his most important contributions lay in his distinctive vision of geography as a humanities discipline, which enabled the rebuilding of intellectual connections between geographers and other scholars and practitioners across the arts and humanities; and his emphasis on the importance of dialogue between Anglophone and European geographical traditions, which involved him in important collaborations with geographers in France, Italy and Germany, as well as in North America and Brazil.

Denis was an inspiration to many students and colleagues, and he will be fondly remembered here at Royal Holloway. A considerable body of his writings is still to be published, including a major volume of essays entitled Geography and Vision (shortly to be published by I B Tauris), a book co-edited with Veronica della Dora (High Places, published by I B Tauris), academic papers in journals such as Environment and Planning A, and catalogue essays accompanying the work of artists and photographers.

A full biography and tribute may be found on the UCLA Department of Geography website, at http://www.geog.ucla.edu/cosgrove.php.