Barry Cooper, a fourth generation Albertan, was educated at Shawnigan Lake School, the University of British Columbia, and Duke University. He taught at universities in Laurentian Canada before coming to the University of Calgary in 1981. He has translated, edited, or written over 35 books, most recently (with Marco Navarro-Génie), Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic. He has written extensively on Canadian politics, and the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin. In 2004, he published New Political Religions: An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, a copy of which was recovered from the personal library of the late Osama bin Laden when his compound in Abbottabad was visited by members of Seal Team Six. In 2020 he published Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art and is currently working on a book on Neolithic political symbols.

Cooper has lectured in Europe, the United States, India, Australia, New Zealand, and China. He has received numerous on-going research grants from North American and European granting agencies, including two major awards, the Konrad Adenauer Award from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, and a Killam Research Fellowship. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1993.