ABOUT

Cecilio M. Cooper, PhD is a postdoctoral Faculty Fellow with New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis after serving as a Forsyth Postdoctoral Research Fellow with University of Michigan's History of Art Department. They hold a PhD [with Distinction] in African American Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Critical Theory from Northwestern University. 
 
Early Modern Visual Culture, Science + Technology Studies, Black Diasporic Art + Media, Occult Iconography, Political Theology + Religion, Black Critical Theory, as well as Trans Studies are among the fields their research engages. Dr. Cooper is currently preparing their first book manuscript, which is tentatively titled South of Heaven: Surface, Territory + the Black Chthonic. By engaging the visual cultures of alchemy + demonology, it examines the occulted roles that blackness + darkness play in cosmological constitutions of subsurface space.

Their research has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Antiquarian Society, John Carter Brown Library, and Yale Center for British Art, among others.