Kate Cooper

Cooper was born in 1960 in Washington, D.C.[2][3][4][5] She gained a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University in 1982, and an M.T.S. in Scripture and Interpretation from Harvard University in 1986. She was awarded her doctorate for the thesis 'Concord and Martyrdom: Gender, Community, and the Uses of Christian Perfection in Late Antiquity' from the Department of the Study of Religion, Princeton University, in 1992.[6][2][3] Her supervisor was Peter Brown.[7] She is known by and publishes under the name Kate Cooper.[5]

Cooper held a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2012–15) for a project on 'The Early Christian Martyr Acts: A New Approach to Ancient Heroes of Resistance'.[8] Her research interests are the cultural, social, and religious history of late Roman society, focusing particularly on the Christianization of Roman elites,[9] and on daily life and the Roman family, religion and gender, social identity, and the fall of the Roman Empire.[10] Other major fellowships and prizes she has held include a Research Councils UK Fellowship to investigate the role of violence in early Christianity during the century before and after the reign of Constantine the Great, asking what was distinctive about the Christian approach to violence, and the role of violence in establishing identities and boundaries between communities (2009–12);[11] and the Rome Prize (1990-1).[12] She was a Summer Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 1998. Her project was “The Roman Cult of Eastern Martyrs, 400–700”.[13] She is a regular contributor to print and broadcast media in the US and UK, and blogs about her work.[14]

Her work has been described as 'ambitious', 'valuable', and 'noteworthy'.[15] Band of Angels was reviewed in the New Statesman, which said: "Her book is characterised by a scholarly seriousness and the disarmingly unapologetic way she links the personal, the political and the institutional. Avoiding clichés, she excavates the experiences of a wide range of women, letting them speak for themselves. Strikingly, she also refers to her own experiences."[16] The work was described as '‘the best kind of popular history.’[17]

A more mixed view was taken in a review in The Daily Telegraph, which found "Cooper has written a highly readable and important work of the history of religion. She wears her evident scholarship lightly, but the text is suffused with personal, imaginative and emotional perspectives. From the prologue, with its memories of her childhood and her mother, to the epilogue's fictitious portrayal of a virgin mother at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century, she abandons the detachment of the professional historian. While this can work well in the realms of human history, it seems to me problematic in the domain of religious history. This fine book, in other words, left me wondering whether Prof Cooper wasn’t having her faith claims and eating them."[18]

A The Guardian review said the book was "as much an exercise in historical detective work as anything else, an act of reading between and behind the lines, rescuing these lost women from ancient sources, assessing their influence, and placing their lives in a broader social and historical context."[19]

Cooper was shortlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize for Queens of a Fallen World: The lost women of Augustine’s Confessions.[20]

• List of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome 1991–2010