Mackenzie Cooley is a historian of nature’s entanglement with power. She unearths how early modern people sought to control, classify, and extract from the living world – while often being transformed by it in return. 

A scholar of early modern Italy, Spain, and the Spanish Empire, Cooley earned her PhD at Stanford University and held a number of fellowships, including Fulbright, Council on Library and Information Resources, Cornell Presidential Postdoc, Villa I Tatti, and NEH-CAORC.

Her first book, The Perfection of Nature (2022), reveals how Renaissance breeding shaped ideas of race, human potential, and dominion over animals. She co-edited the books Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (2023) and Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue (2025). 

Cooley also co-leads Historical Pharmacopeias, a digital humanities project mapping the evolution of medical knowledge across cultures.

Currently, Cooley is charting a new history of bioprospecting – the quest to harness nature for human health – illuminating the ambitions and limits of global scientific knowledge. Across archives, species, and centuries, her work confronts the past to present urgent questions about the future of medicine, politics, and the human relationship with nature itself.

In her current work, Cooley is examining the study of enhancement and bodily potential in early modernity, and transhistorical resonances. She hopes that the history of science can help map out many potential routes forward with markers both of pitfalls and vistas that may open. 

Today, Cooley is an associate professor at Hamilton College. There, she launched the New World Nature research team, which takes the model of a laboratory and applies it to the study of early modern history. Nearly thirty student researchers have so far been funded through the project. In September 2024, the initiative’s fifth symposium showcased the latest research on early modern drug discovery and spice price lists, one of many topics linked to Cooley’s research to be studied in the program.