Amy Cooper is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Arts. Professor Cooper earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in May of 2018, where she studied Early Modern literature. Her scholarly interests include: Early Modern literature and culture, poetry and poetics, history of science, the arts of memory, and aesthetics.

Her current book project, “Speaking Pictures”: From Aesthesis to Aesthetics in Early Modernity traces the influence of early modern theories of vision and memory on poetic theory and practice to account for the emergence of aesthetics as an independent discourse in the eighteenth century. While we now associate the term “aesthetics” with art, beauty, judgment, and taste, the word “aesthetics” originally meant something very different. When the philosopher Alexander Baumgarten coined the term in 1735, its meaning was still closely associated with its Greek root, αἰσθησις (aesthesis)—“sensory perception.” But how did we get from aesthesis, “sensory perception” (what cognitive ecologists might today call “sensory cognition”) to Aesthetics, the philosophical study of art? “Speaking Pictures,” argues that to study the history of aesthetics before Kant requires a focus on theories of sensory cognition from classical antiquity through the scientific revolution, and in particular on the role of vision and images in premodern culture. Because theories of sensory cognition were invariably patterned after the mechanics of vision in the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods, the concept of aesthetic form was intimately bound up with cognitive theories of the image well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whereas other histories of the image tend to focus on the “sister arts tradition,” the common notion that painting was visual poetry and poetry was spoken painting captured in the Horatian catchphrase, ut pictura poesis, “Speaking Pictures” traces an alternative history of the image–one that draws from the art of memory, an ancient cognitive regime unique to the pre-modern period–to better understand what aesthetics before Kant looked like.

Ph.D., Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. (2018)

M.A. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. (2014)

Bachelor of Arts, UC Irvine, Irvine, Calif. (2010)

Assistant Professor, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colo. (2018-Present)

Outstanding Educator Award (April 2023)

Madame Elaine Tendetnik Award for Team Building (May 2022)

Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship. School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. (2017-2018)

Short-term Research Fellowship. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. (July 2017)

Graduate Fellowship. Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.(2015-16)

Mellon Foundation Research Grant. Folger Shakespeare Library Summer Research (Summer 2016)

Early Modern Literature and Culture

Literature and Science

Literature and Religion

History of Aesthetics

Poetry

Drama