Lecture: Professor Mackenzie Cooley
November 2 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
“The Perfection of Nature”
Professor Mackenzie Cooley
Assistant Professor of History, Director of Latin American Studies
Hamilton College
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
2:00-3:00 PM
Curti Lounge (Rm 5243 Humanities Bldg)
Event Description and Speaker Bio: Mackenzie Cooley is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern science and medicine. Her first book, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Humans, and Race in the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2022), offers a deep history of how Renaissance Italy and the Spanish empire were shaped by a lingering fascination with breeding. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation and Mellon Foundation, among other grants. Over 2021-22, Cooley was Villa I Tatti Residential Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies where she developed research for her second monograph, Treasury of Knowledge: Medicine in Renaissance Empire. She is presently co-editing two volumes: Natural Things: Ecologies of Knowledge in the Early Modern World and Knowing an Empire: Imperial Science in the Chinese and Spanish Empires, 1500-1800.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History and Latin American, Caribbean & Iberian Studies Program
