Mackenzie Cooley graduated with her Bachelor of Arts in History and Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2012, where she received high honors and the Anne Macintyre Litchfield Prize for Excellence in History. Currently, she is a Ph. D. candidate in the Stanford University Department of History where she studies the Early Modern European and Atlantic worlds with minor fields in Renaissance Studies, Colonial Latin America, and History of Science. Her dissertation considers the collection and design of living beings in the expanding Renaissance world, with attention to animals, natural history, and the knowledge of reproduction in Renaissance Italy, Habsburg Spain, and the Spanish Americas. 

During her time at Stanford, she completed the Ph.D minor in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality studies and acted as graduate coordinator at the Women's Community Center where she developed new programming on Bioethics and the Gendered Body. "Beasts & Books: An Exhibition of Rare Books and Manuscripts" curated by Mackenzie Cooley is open in Stanford's Green Library Spring 2015.