Elena Cooper

Dr Elena Cooper is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at CREATe, the centre for copyright law research, University of Glasgow. She is the author of Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image (CUP, 2018), the first in-depth and longitudinal study of the history of copyright concerning the visual arts (painting, engraving and photography in the UK, 1850-1911) which was shortlisted for the Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship by the Society of Legal Scholars in 2020. Elena has explored the relation between copyright history and art history in two articles published in The Burlington Magazine: ‘The Visual Turn in Copyright History and its Relevance to Art History’ (Dec. 2021) and ‘Whistler’s ‘Symphony in White No.1’ through the Lens of Copyright History’ (May 2022). She has given talks at the Victorian Picture Gallery, Royal Holloway, Keble College Chapel, Oxford (Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’) and The Hunterian Gallery, Glasgow (Whistler’s ‘Portrait of Lady Eden’), connecting nineteenth century paintings to themes in copyright history. Elena is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Historical Society. She is co-editor of the British section of the digital resource ‘Primary Sources on Copyright History, 1450-1900’ ed. Bently and Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org.