Media
Times of India Feature on ‘The Spanish empire used notions from animal breeding for human beings — this suffused racism’
Times Evoke
July 6, 2024
High Theory Podcast
In this episode of High Theory, Mackenzie Cooley talks about animals. The animal lies at the center of science and the human, from imperial conquest and Enlightenment thought to the creatures on our dinner plates and sitting beside us at the table. The practices of animal breeding and the politics of making life are, in Mackenzie’s account, key to understanding the history of race, as a concept that emerged in the Early Modern World.
Renaissance Eugenics History Extra podcast
Whether it was creating super-fast thoroughbreds, or fashioning dogs small enough to fit in your sleeve, animal breeding was an obsession of the Renaissance era. And, as Mackenzie Cooley reveals, animal husbandry prompted people to think about whether humankind could also be improved by selective breeding. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne about her Cundill Prize-shortlisted book The Perfection of Nature, she discusses how ideas about animal breeding tied into colonialism, race and eugenics.
The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed.
Phytochem Talk
New Worlds of Drug Discovery:
Path Dependency in Early Modern Atlantic Pharmacopeia
Designing Natural Things
How Images Make Meaning in History of Science
with Anna Toledano and Duygu Yıldırım, Society for Social Studies of Science Blog, May 8, 2023
A Medical Book in an Avignonese Pharmacy (1492)
with Daniel Lord Smail, Object of the Month, Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, May 14, 2022
After Derby Day, A Note of Caution about Horses and Races
The Irony is that Racing Bred Race
The Public Seminar, May 10, 2023
History News Network, April 30, 2023,
The Perfection of Nature
Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance
New Books Network, October 31, 2022
New World and Beyond
A Review of New World Nature
By Shery Chanis, Not Even Past, April 29, 2022
Villa I Tatti Fellowship
The Treasury of Knowledge: Medicine in Renaissance Empire
New World Nature
Undergraduate Student Research
By Maureen Nolan, Hamilton Magazine, July 3, 2020
Humans, Animals, Race, History—Intertwined
By Jackie Swift, Research & Innovation, Cornell University