Professor John P Cooper (he/him/his/himself)

I am a leading scholar on the indigenous nautical technologies and seafaring traditions in the Indian Ocean and Islamicate worlds, focusing on the medieval and modern eras. My very multidisciplinary toolkit spans maritime archaeology, Arabic language, linguistics, cartography, ethnography and journalism, enabling me to address critical questions from diverse disciplinary perspectives, both as a researcher and an educator. My work has taken me from the western Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal, and many points in between, engaging with both archaeology and living communities to reflect on how people create technologies and knowledge systems that enable them to engage with their maritime environments. I aspire to be collaborative and co-creative in my research and publishing, and recognise the historically exploitative and colonial nature of much past European scholarship on the regions and in the disciplines in which I work. I explore how the existing corpus often reflects and serves colonial hostility, and how community-heritage engagement might create alternative, multivocal views of the past. I create text, illustrations, photography, film and exhibitions.

I teach Islamic archaeology and some Arabic at the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies and supervise doctoral students across a wide range of disciplines and methods.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, Royal Anthropological Instititute, Nautical Archaeology Society and Higher Education Academy and sit on the academic boards of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, the Journal of Arabian Studies and Archaeonautica.

I am also a member of the Centre for Islamic Archaeology and Centre for Gulf Studies at the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies.