Tracey-Anne Cooper

Tracey-Anne Cooper is an Associate Professor in the History Department, where she teaches the core course, “Emergence of Global Society” and various courses on medieval Europe and medieval Britain.

Cooper joined the history department in 2006 with an M. A. and a Ph. D in Medieval History from Boston College. She graduated with honours from Lancaster University, UK in 1997 with a B. A. (first class) in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She spent her second year as an undergraduate studying at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.

Cooper’s main area of research is Anglo-Saxon England and she is particularly interested in manuscript studies, and intellectual and religious history. Her dissertation “Reconstructing a deconstructed manuscript, community and culture: London BL Cotton Tiberius A.iii”, presented a new methodology for the field of manuscript studies in which a compilation manuscript was examined as a contextual whole. This holistic approach allowed texts which would ordinarily have been only examined by scholars in discrete fields of study to be regarded in the proximity of their original context. This method revealed a strong connection between the liturgy, monastic rules, pastoral care texts, charms and prognostics of the manuscript which had hitherto seemed to present a farrago. That connection was the various facets of the job of the archbishop, for whom, Cooper argues, this manuscript was compiled.

Cooper has published several scholarly articles in journals such as Anglo-Norman Studies, the Haskins Society Journal and Notes and Queries. She is currently in the process of revising her dissertation for publication. Cooper has also given numerous papers on her research interests at international conferences, including, the International Medieval Conference, Leeds, UK (2003, 2006); the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo, MI (2002, 2003, 2006); the Haskins Society Conference (1998, 2003, 2005) and the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies, Battle, UK in 2005.