Amy Cooper is an Associate Professor of English specializing in Renaissance literature and culture, poetry and poetics, history of science, the arts of memory, and aesthetics. Her work has appeared in ELH, Studies in Philology, and most recently an edited collection, Historicizing the Embodied Imagination.

Her current book project, Speaking Pictures: From Aesthesis to Aesthetics offers a new history of aesthetics that begins, not in the eighteenth century but in the sixteenth. The word “aesthetic” comes from the Greek word αἴστησις or “sensory perception.” How, Speaking Pictures asks, how did a word for “sensory perception” come to mean, instead, the philosophy of art? There are many excellent studies of individual aesthetic concepts—including beauty, judgement, autonomy, and ekphrasis—but by focusing on traditional aesthetic categories, such studies implicitly presuppose a Kantian framework in their approach. In fact, the origins of those traditional aesthetic categories themselves can be traced to the close association of the representational arts and premodern theories of cognition in the late medieval and early modern periods. Premodern discourses in medicine, faculty psychology (what we might now call cognitive science), and the visual arts all played important roles in defining the mechanics of both sensation and cognition, but it was through their knowledge of the memory arts that poets developed not just a theory but also a practical, working understanding of the visual imagination. A rich body of research now exists on the history of sensory cognition in the medieval and early modern periods. Speaking Pictures brings this scholarship to bear on the history of aesthetics through a study of early modern poets, who gradually transformed the principles for constructing artificial memories into what we might now call aesthetic principles of poetic representation.

Ph.D., English Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (2018)

M.A., English Literature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (2014)

B.A. English Literature with minors in Latin and Philosophy, University of California, Irvine (2010)

Associate Professor, Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado (July 2024 − present)

Assistant Professor, Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado (June 2018 − July 2024)

Academic Service

Faculty Senate President; Faculty Senate, U.S. Air Force Academy (2023-24)

Senator At-Large representing Assistant Professors and Lecturers; Faculty Senate, U.S. Air Force Academy (2021-present)

Organizer, New Faculty Orientation; Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (Summer 2023)

Organizer, New Faculty Orientation; Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (Summer 2022)

Chair, Graduate School Fellowship Program selection committee (GSP); Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (2022-23)

Director of Undergraduate Studies; Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (2022-23)

Vice President; Faculty Senate, U.S. Air Force Academy (2022-23)

First Reader for Undergraduate Thesis, “The Rape of Lucrece: Understanding Female Power Through Shakespeare,” by Katarina Svetz, winner of the DFEN Prize for best Senior Capstone (2023)

Event Co-organizer, Actors from the London Stage (AFTLS); Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (2021-22)

Chair, Tenure and Faculty Development Special Committee; Faculty Senate, U.S. Air Force Academy (2021-22)

Humanities Representative, Dean’s Tenure Subcommittee on Faculty Development; U.S. Air Force Academy (2020-22)

Director, Air Force Humanities Institute; U.S. Air Force Academy (2020-21)

Assistant Faculty Research Director; Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (2018-21)

US Air Force Academy Representative, Arts In The Armed Forces (AITAF); joint virtual event with US Military Academy and US Naval Academy (2020-21)

Visiting Speaker Coordinator; Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (2020-21)

Humanities Division Representative, U.S. Air Force Academy Falcon Visitation Experience (2020)

Guest Speaker, Book Launch: Claudia Hauer, Strategic Humanism. St. John’s College (2020)

Dean’s Summer Research Program Selection Committee, member; Department of Political Science, U.S. Air Force Academy (2018-20)

Assistant Director for Air Force Humanities Institute, U.S. Air Force Academy (2019-20)

Ad hoc member, Faculty Senate Subcommittee on Tenure; Faculty Senate, U.S. Air Force Academy (2019-2020)

Second Reader for Undergraduate Thesis, “Memory as Narrative: The Cognitive Science Perspective in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,” by Eloise Gayer, awarded the Henry Rutgers Scholar Award (2016-2017)

Graduate Research Mentor; Aresty Research Center, Rutgers University (2016-2017)

Short-term Research Fellowship. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. (July 2024)

Dean’s Award for Service to the Institution, Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (2023)

Outstanding Academy Educator (OAE) Award, Department of English, U.S. Air Force Academy (2023)

Madame Elaine Tendetnik Award for Team Building, U.S. Air Force Academy Faculty Senate (May 2023)

Madame Elaine Tendetnik Award for Team Building, U.S. Air Force Academy Faculty Senate (May 2022)

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

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

Aesthetics, Poetry and Poetics, Early Modern Literature, Shakespearean and Non-Shakespearean Drama, Spenser, Milton, Seventeenth-Century Literature and Philosophy, Skepticism, Rhetoric, History and Philosophy of Science, Memory Studies, Historical Phenomenology, History of the Senses.