Melinda Cooper University of Sydney

Melinda Cooper graduated from the University of Paris VIII in 2001and is now Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the broad areas of social studies of finance, biomedical economies, neoliberalism and new social conservatisms. She has published two books on the political economy of the life sciences - Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (University of Washington Press 2008) and Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy (Duke University Press 2014), cowritten with Catherine Waldby. Her more recent work returns to questions of political theory and political economy and is specifically interested in the alliance between neoliberal and new conservative political currents that crystallized in mid-1970s America. She has recently completed a manuscript Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which attempts to explain this alliance and its political manifestations from the Reagan revolution onwards. The book is due to be published in Zone Book¹s Near Futures series in late 2016 or early 2017. She is one of the editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy and (with Martijn Konings) of the Duke University Press book series Transactions: Critical Studies in Finance, Economy and Theory.