David L. Cooper

Mathematics major
English major
Class of 1972

(1/6/2014) Associate Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures
Director of Undergraduate Studies

After graduating in May 1992 I joined the Peace Corps–I had worked with a Peace Corps volunteer on SST in the Dominican Republic in the summer of 1991. I was assigned to Czechoslovakia as an English teacher. I had completed a double major in English and Math. That was a great teaching job at an interesting place in an interesting time! I was in a secondary school in Trnava, Slovakia, and the students were on fire to learn English–it was their ticket to good jobs and travel. The country split while I was there, the Velvet Divorce.

I returned home in 1994 and began graduate studies at Penn State in Comparative Literature and began to study Russian and Czech intensively because it was clear that Slovak language would not get me very far. In 1996 I began my PhD studies at Columbia University in Slavic Languages and Literatures. There I met my future wife as well. She got a tenure track job at the University of Illinois in 2003 and we moved to Champaign-Urbana. I defended my dissertation in January 2004 and got a tenure track position as well in 2005, teaching Russian literature and Czech language. Currently I am a tenured Associate Professor and director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center on campus as well as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Slavic department (Slavic and Russian majors and minors). http://www.slavic.illinois.edu/people/dlcoop/

While my career path has taken me rather far from mathematics, my training in math has always served me well, particularly the training in rigorous logical argumentation. Also, Russian scholars have done some interesting statistical studies of poetic language and structure that I am able to read and understand better than many of my colleagues. I am probably well positioned to pursue something in the trendy field of digital humanities as well, but haven’t found a project that appeals to me yet.