Kate Cooper

A first-time publication for fast-moving British collaborative artist Kate Cooper (b. 1984) accompanies her solo exhibition at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2015the result of receiving the 2014 Schering Stiftung Art Award. Cooper is co-founder of artist collective Auto Italia South East, and moves between solo and collaborative works addressing issues of capitalism and commercialism. For the KW Institute, Cooper focused around a fictional space titled Look Book. Through digital videos, installations and digitally altered photographic works, she explores the role of gender and the agency of images. For Cooper, producing images is akin to building infrastructure. Her computer-generated bodies are imbued with power and put to work. The oversized catalog designed to accentuate Coopers re-appropriation of female ad images, captures the essence of glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines. Included is a new short story by Hannah Black, texts by Ellen Blumenstein and Christina Weiss, plus subtitles and slogans by Catherine Wood.

“A distinguished ancient historian’s elegant study of the extraordinary women who helped lay the foundations of the early Christian church” (Kirkus Reviews). According to most recorded history, women in the ancient world lived invisibly. In Band of Angels, historian Kate Cooper has pieced together their story from the few contemporary accounts that have survived. Through painstaking detective work, she renders both the past and the present in a new light. Band of Angels tells the remarkable story of how a new understanding of relationships took root in the ancient world. Women from all walks of life played an invaluable role in Christianity's rapid expansion. Their story is a testament to what unseen people can achieve, and how the power of ideas can change the world, on household at a time.

Edward Gibbon laid the fall of the Roman Empire at Christianity's door, suggesting that 'pusillanimous youth preferred the penance of the monastic to the dangers of a military life ... whole legions were buried in these religious sanctuaries'. This surprising 2007 study suggests that, far from seeing Christianity as the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, we should understand the Christianisation of the household as a central Roman survival strategy. By establishing new 'ground rules' for marriage and family life, the Roman Christians of the last century of the Western empire found a way to re-invent the Roman family as a social institution to weather the political, military, and social upheaval of two centuries of invasion and civil war. In doing so, these men and women - both clergy and lay - found themselves changing both what it meant to be Roman, and what it meant to be Christian.

Rejecting Roman feminine virtue in its pure form, Christianity claimed a moral superiority in its ideals of romance, and portrayed women seeking more spiritual goals. Cooper studies how this connected with social and religious change.

"This tense wire of a novel thrums with suspense. . . . [this book] just might be the highlight of your summer.”–The New York Times Cheryl Strayed's Wild meets The Revenant in this heart-pounding story of survival and revenge in the unforgiving wilderness. After: Jess is alone. Her cabin has burned to the ground. She knows if she doesn’t act fast, the cold will kill her before she has time to worry about food. But she is still alive—for now. Before: Jess hadn’t seen her survivalist, off-the-grid dad in over a decade. But after a car crash killed her mother and left her injured, she was forced to move to his cabin in the remote Canadian wilderness. Just as Jess was beginning to get to know him, a secret from his past paid them a visit, leaving her father dead and Jess stranded. After: With only her father’s dog for company, Jess must forage and hunt for food, build shelter, and keep herself warm. Some days it feels like the wild is out to destroy her, but she’s stronger than she ever imagined. Jess will survive. She has to. She knows who killed her father…and she wants revenge.

Explores how in late antiquity women, slaves, and children claimed agency in small-scale communities despite intimidation by the powerful.

At the end of a winter-long journey into manhood, Little Hawk returns to find his village decimated by a white man's plague and soon, despite a fresh start, Little Hawk dies violently but his spirit remains trapped, seeing how his world changes.

Ellen Muehlberger explores the diverse and inventive ideas Christians held about angels in late antiquity. During the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians began experimenting with new modes of piety, adapting longstanding forms of public authority to Christian leadership and advancing novel ways of cultivating body and mind to further the progress of individual Christians. Muehlberger argues that in practicing these new modes of piety, Christians developed new ways of thinking about angels. The book begins with a detailed examination of the two most popular discourses about angels that developed in late antiquity. In the first, developed by Christians cultivating certain kinds of ascetic practices, angels were one type of being among many in a shifting universe, and their primary purpose was to guard and to guide Christians. In the other, articulated by urban Christian leaders in contest with one another, angels were morally stable characters described in the emerging canon of Scripture, available to enable readers to render Scripture coherent with emerging theological positions. Muehlberger goes on to show how these two discourses did not remain isolated in separate spheres of cultivation and contestation, but influenced one another and the wider Christian culture. She offers in-depth analysis of popular biographies written in late antiquity, of the community standards of emerging monastic communities, and of the training programs developed to prepare Christians to participate in ritual, demonstrating that new ideas about angels shaped and directed the formation of the definitive institutions of late antiquity. Angels in Late Ancient Christianity is a meticulous and thorough study of early Christian ideas about angels, but it also offers a different perspective on late ancient Christian history, arguing that angels were central rather than peripheral to the emergence of Christian institutions and Christian culture in late antiquity.