ALIX COOPER

Associate Professor

PhD, Harvard University, 1998

Office: Social & Behavioral Sciences - Level 3, Room S-345

Read Dr. Alex Cooper's CV

Interests: Early modern Europe, science, medicine, environment, women and gender, cross-cultural encounters

Bio:

My work considers the histories of science and medicine, as well as environmental history, in Europe (and, to a certain extent, its colonies) during the early modern period (16th–18th centuries), in particular in the areas of the Holy Roman Empire (i.e., Germany and surrounding regions) and the Dutch Republic (i.e., the Netherlands). I am interested in how changes occurred during the early modern period in what people thought about the natural world and/or environment, as well as about the human body, amidst enormous transformations in Europeans' relationships with other parts of the globe. In my first book, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, I explored how Europeans applied concepts such as the "domestic" and the "outlandish" to understanding the areas they lived in. My current research focuses on the role of naturalists' family members (including wives, husbands, daughters, and sons) in generating knowledge about the natural world from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, and, more broadly, ideas of health, environment, and occupation in early modern Europe.

Recent Courses:

HIS 535 Body, Gender, and Power
HIS 652 Geography, Identity, and Environment

Select Works:

"The Indigenous versus the Exotic: Debating Natural Origins in Early Modern Europe," Landscape Research, 28, 1 (2003), 51-60 (as part of special issue on "The Native, Naturalized, and Exotic: Plants and Animals in History").

"Homes and Households," in The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 224-237. Read the book chapter.

"Picturing Nature: Gender and the Politics of Natural-Historical Description in Eighteenth-Century Gdańsk/Danzig," Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, special issue on "The Cultural Production of Natural Knowledge," 36, 4 (December 2013), 519-529. Read the article.