S. P. Cooper is a 2022-2023 John and Daria Berry Postdoctoral Fellow in the James Madison Program in the Princeton University Department of Politics. He is the Vice-President of the International Courtly Literature Society’s North American Branch, and he is on the advisory board of the journal Encomia.
Previously, he was Assistant Professor of English at Rochester University and Full-Time Faculty at Oakland Community College, where he taught until 2022. He studied History and English at Oakland University (B.A.), before beginning graduate studies (M.A.) in the English department at the same institution, writing a thesis titled Loyalty to Leviathan: Andrew Marvell’s Politics in the Cromwellian Poems. He accepted a Thomas C. Rumble fellowship to study mediæval English Literary and Cultural Studies at Wayne State University (Ph.D.), where he wrote a dissertation titled Chivalry and Governance in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
Dr. Cooper’s scholarship centres on the relationship between political philosophy and culture, and his work focuses on the complex interplay between political theory, cultural practises, and literary depictions of polities. He has presented and organised many panels at the International Congress on Mediæval Studies, and he has a chapter entitled “The Decline of Chivalry: Performative Courtliness in Malory’s Le Morte Darthur” in Courtly Pastimes (Routledge, 2022) edited by Gloria Allaire and Julie Human. At Princeton, he is working on a manuscript addressing how an emerging Hobbesian state of nature in the American Constituional order may be addressed by a Common Good administrative state constrained within the framework of Madisonian Democracy.
Beyond research, Dr. Cooper’s poetry has been published in Forma and North American Anglican, and he is an accomplished pianist and organist: a church music director in the Archdiocese of Detroit during the early 2000s, he also taught piano at regional music academies. His extracurricular interests include attending performances of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Michigan Opera Theatre, and watching that greatest of all sports: Test Cricket.
Twitter: @Prof_Cooper