Dr Elena Cooper

Information

Elena Cooper is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. From April 2014, she holds this post concurrently with a Research Fellowship at the AHRC funded CREATe Copyright Centre at Glasgow University. Her research to date stems from two projects, both undertaken at the Faculty of Law, Cambridge University.

First, her PhD research concerned the history of photographic copyright 1850-1911. The thesis, supervised by Professor Lionel Bently, won a Yorke Prize in 2011 (awarded by the Law Faculty, Cambridge since 1871 for theses of 'exceptional quality that make a substantial contribution to legal knowledge'). She is currently extending and developing this research into her first monograph, 'The Contested Image: Art and Copyright 1850-1911'.

Secondly, shortly after her doctoral viva in 2011, Elena worked for two years as a post-doctoral researcher on an interdisciplinary project: Of Authorship and Originality funded by a 1 million Euro grant from Humanities in the European Research Area shared by the Universities of Cambridge, Amsterdam and Bergen. The project asked how the humanities might help lawyers re-think the copyright concepts of 'author' and 'work', with the Cambridge strand focussing on multiple authorship. Elena's output from this project included five written articles (four solely authored and one equally co-authored with a post-doctoral researcher in Philosophy) approaching the question of multiple authorship from empirical, philosophical, comparative and historical perspectives.

Elena's future research plans include an investigation into the intersections between trade mark law and lexicography in the assertion of 'jurisdiction' over the meaning of words, and the history of the role of criminal law in the domain of intellectual property.