Ashley Cooper is a PhD Student in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale. A recipient of the Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellowship and Yale’s Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration Fellowship, Ashley’s research lies at the nexus of the history of psychiatry and the history of emotions, with a particular emphasis on the racialization and masculinization of suicide in twentieth-century America. Ashley’s research specifically investigates how clinical, actuarial, and media depictions of suicidality have served to ossify an image of youth suicidality as a white, masculinized phenomenon, while simultaneously displacing Black youth from the psychiatric category of suicide. In recognition of her research and leadership, Ashley was named a 2025 Health Policy Research Scholar by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Ashley graduated from Harvard College in 2021 with Highest Honors in Neuroscience and Anthropology, a Secondary Field in the History of Science, and a Language Citation in French. Her undergraduate thesis entitled, “Racism’s Health Harm on Black Youth Mental Health: From (Neuro)Scientific Orthodoxy to Neuroscience as a Vessel of Visibility,” received the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for outstanding undergraduate research and the Harvard Anthropology Department’s Clyde Kluckhohn Prize for interdisciplinary anthropology. Ashley received her MPhil in Health, Medicine, and Society from the University of Cambridge in 2022, earning First Class Honors with Distinction and serving as the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar. She also holds a Master of Science from Harvard Medical School in Media, Medicine, and Health.

Striving to leverage her historical research to effect public health change, her writing has been published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, JAMA Pediatrics, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Ashley is also a member of the Community Histories Lab at Yale, where she leads a project on the history of suicide prevention services in the United States. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation.