Vera Keller (AB Harvard ’02; Ph.D. Princeton ’08) is an Associate Professor of History at the Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon. 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. Keller is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters. Her research has been funded by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität (Munich), the Fritz Thyssen Foundation (Gotha-Erfurt), the Warburg Institute (London) and the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel). Keller serves on the international editorial boards of the journals Lias and Nuncius and of the book series, Universal Reform: Studies in Intellectual History, 1550-1700 (Routledge). She is currently a Rare Books School-Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography.
Areas of Interest: History of Science, of Technology, of the Book, of Sociability, and Political Thought
