Portraits in Cloth

By Amy M Cools

Amy M. Cools is a historian, educator, researcher, and author. She is a Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, Newcastle, as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2026). She specializes in the history of ideas, African American and United States history (especially antebellum), the study of civil rights movements, biographical explorations of extraordinary people, the history of philosophy, issues in ethics and law, and other topics in history, philosophy, and intellectual history. Amy holds a PhD in History (2021) and an MA in Intellectual History with Distinction (2018) from the University of Edinburgh (2018); a BA in Philosophy: Ethics, Politics and Law, Summa Cum Laude from California State University at Sacramento (2013), and an AA in Humanities and Fine Arts from Riverside City College (1999). Her doctoral thesis, ‘The Life and Work of James McCune Smith (1813-1865),’ is the first completed book-length biographical study dedicated to this pioneering intellectual, scientist, and physician. Amy’s project as a BA Fellow at Northumbria is to compile and edit McCune Smith’s complete written works. She is also currently writing a biography of McCune Smith, under contract with the University of Georgia Press. A native of California, USA, she currently makes her home near Newcastle upon Tyne, England, with her beloved husband and dog