Professor of Law and Political Theory Davina Cooper has been made a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the representative body of the social sciences in the United Kingdom.
Fellows are drawn from academics, practitioners and policymakers across the social sciences who are recognised after an extensive peer review process for the excellence and impact of their work addressing some of society’s most pressing issues.
The Academy recognises that Professor Cooper is internationally known for her work on the British state’s relationship to sexuality.
Regarded as a highly influential and visionary thinker, Professor Cooper was Director of the AHRC Research Centre for Law, Gender & Sexuality. Her work on the state, re-imagining political concepts, and on everyday utopias has been published, cited, profiled, and translated across a wide range of disciplines, including socio-legal studies, geography, politics, anthropology, gender studies and education. Professor Cooper was awarded the Charles Taylor Book Award 2015 for her book Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces (Duke University Press, 2013)
Earlier this year Professor Cooper, working with a team of colleagues, secured a grant of £724,000 for ‘Reforming Legal Gender Identity: A Socio-Legal Evaluation’, a three-year study investigating and evaluating the regulation of gender status in the law of England and Wales.
And in February, Professor Cooper was awarded an Advanced Research Prize in the 2017 University Research Prizes in recognition of work undertaken for her project ‘Transformative concepts: A methodological and political challenge.’