S. P. Cooper is Assistant Editor at The European Conservative and Vice-President of the International Courtly Literature Society’s North American Branch. He is also on the advisory board of the journal Encomia.
Most recently, he was a John and Daria Berry Postdoctral Research Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Prior to that, 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. He has a forthcoming chapter on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight coming in a volume from Paris Nanterre University Press. His current book project, Literature and the Common Good, begun during his research fellowship at Princeton, examines the portrayal of the Common Good in English literature from Malory to Tolkien.
Beyond research, Dr. Cooper’s poetry has been published in The European Conservative, The Lamp, Law & Liberty, The American Mind, North American Anglican, and Forma. 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