Profile picture of Vera Keller

Vera Keller

Professor
History
Phone: 541-346-6903
Office: 309 McKenzie Hall
Office Hours: Winter 23, Tuesday 2:00-3:00 p.m., Wednesday 3:00-4:00 p.m.

Biography

Pronouns: she/her/hers

        Vera Keller is a historian of early modern Europe particularly interested in the history of knowledge and the history of science.  Her research has been supported by many grants and fellowships, including a Ryskamp Research Fellowship (ACLS) and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has published three monographs and over forty articles and has edited six volumes and journal special issues. Her first book , Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge UP, 2015),  studied the entanglement of science with political theory as the experimental sciences came to be imagined as the form of knowledge most serving the "public interest."  Her second book,  The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (Hopkins, 2023), winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America, challenged the idea that modern science disciplined the self, society, and knowledge. Instead, it removed the safeguards from the liberal arts to foment a no-holds-barred conquistadorial approach to knowledge appropriation, experimentation, and disruptive invention around the globe. Her third monograph, Curating the Enlightenment: Johann Daniel Major and the Experimental Century (Cambridge UP, 2024), studies how academics in the late seventeenth century labored to create the research disciplines and the research university as a means to incorporate undisciplined, advancing knowledge back into the liberal arts while re-applying infrastructures promoting critical reasoning and defenses against bias. Her next project, Superability, will offer a disability history of ability in the Renaissance. With Markus Friedrich and Christine von Oertzen, Keller co-edits a book series from De Gruyter, Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History.