Vera Keller

A historian of science and an early modern Europeanist, Keller is interested in the co-production of science and politics. Her first book, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575-1725 (Cambridge, 2015) explores how scientific ideas such as matter theory helped naturalize and reframe political ideas such as interest, while political concepts helped structure new scientific formations, such as the “advancement of learning.” She is currently completing her second book, which returns to the subject of her dissertation, the inventor, alchemist, and philosopher Cornelis Drebbel (1572-1633). Her third book project, Cultures of Citation, will offer a comparative study of professional standards for citation and credit in emerging bibliography and museology in England and Northern Europe in the late seventeenth century.