Cecilio M. Cooper

Cecilio M. Cooper is a 2024–2025 Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Science History Institute’s Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry after serving as a 2023–2024 Long-Term Research Fellow with the Folger Institute. Via black critical theory, they broadly engage debates around science and technology studies, iconography, transness, as well as political theology.

Cooper’s research has been previously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Antiquarian Society, John Carter Brown Library, Yale Center for British Art, and Folger Shakespeare Library, among others. By examining the visual and material cultures of alchemy and demonology, their first book manuscript unconventionally examines the occulted roles blackness and darkness play in cosmological constitutions of subsurface space. They completed a PhD with distinction in black studies and a graduate certificate in critical theory from Northwestern University.