“The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance”

Presented by Professor Mackenzie Cooley.

About the presentation: 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.

More information: https://history.wisc.edu/event/lecture-professor-mackenzie-cooley/