Dr. Cornelius's research examines the development of “racial science” during the nineteenth century. Her book manuscript titled 'More Approximate to the Animal:' African American Men and Women’s Resistance to the Rise of Scientific Racism in Mid-Nineteenth Century America provides a gendered analysis of the ways in which African Americans - enslaved and free, lettered and illiterate - addressed scientific theories of racial differences. Cornelius argues that a gendered analysis of the development of scientific racial discourse illuminates the ways in which the scientific constructions of human differences served racist, sexist, and imperialist political agendas.
