Mackenzie Cooley

Mackenzie Cooley received her PhD from Stanford University Department of History where she studied history of culture and science in the early modern European and Atlantic world. Currently, she is an assistant professor of history and the director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College.

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.