Amy Cooper

Amy Cooper (she/her) is an Associate Professor of English at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where she teaches Renaissance poetry, drama, and history of science. Her essays have been published in ELH, Studies in Philology, edited collections with Palgrave and Bloomsbury, and recently the Folger’s Collation. Her current book project, “Speaking Pictures: from Aesthesis to Aesthetics” traces how the study of aesthesis, “sensory perception,” evolved into Aesthetics, the philosophical study of art now primarily associated with Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

“Speaking Pictures” argues that the skeptical crisis of the sixteenth century created new fractures in the inherited poetics of earlier periods, and that these fractures led both to new forms of poetic expression and to a realignment of knowledge-making activities into recognizably modern categories—including the distinction between aesthetic and scientific knowledge. Professor Cooper’s time as a short-term Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library during the summer of 2024 helped her establish an archive of evidence for the kinds of transformations in aesthetic categories of perception and experience that her book theorizes.