R. Douglas Cope (1955–2019)

Abstract

R. Douglas Cope, associate professor of history, passed away at Rhode Island Hospital on October 6, 2019, with his sisters at his side. He was 64 years old.Doug, as all knew him, was born on August 24, 1955, in Michigan. He received his BA in history from Oakland University (in Michigan) and his MA (in 1981) and PhD (in 1987) in Latin American history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked under the supervision of Steve Stern, Florencia Mallon, and Thomas Skidmore. Doug's graduate mentors and colleagues recall his brilliance and his almost impossible humility, a rare combination in the ego-driven world of academia. These qualities led Doug to guard his work zealously; his graduate mentors recall having to strategize as to how to get him to relinquish his chapter drafts in order that they might be read and evaluated.Ultimately, that writing took impressive form in Doug's book, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), which received an honorable mention for the 1995 Herbert E. Bolton Prize for the best book in Latin American history. The Limits of Racial Domination represents a pioneering contribution to scholarship on race and class relations in colonial Latin America. In contrast to previous work, which had stressed the hegemony of Spanish racial systems privileging whiteness, Doug captured, through painstaking archival research, the strategic and often-counterhegemonic negotiation of such categories by subaltern colonial subjects. This interest in the political, social, and cultural lives of nonelite actors carried over to Doug's new book project on the informal economy of eighteenth-century Mexico City, which was, at the time of his death, nearly complete. His research on this topic also produced several publications on petty commerce and notions of the public good in late colonial Mexico.After graduating from Wisconsin, Doug held teaching positions at the University of Oregon and the University of Miami before arriving to Brown University in 1988, where he joined his graduate mentor, Thomas Skidmore, on the History Department's faculty. At Brown, Doug oversaw the building of a Latin American studies program, both within and beyond the History Department, to which he dedicated significant energy over the course of his career. He served a five-year term as book review editor for the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1997 to 2002. He was also known as a beloved undergraduate teacher, whose courses on colonial Latin America, Mexico, the Mexican Revolution, the Atlantic world, Central America, indigenous history, ethnic and racial formations, and, most recently, pirates inspired a devoted—indeed, we might say zealous—following. Doug was an effortless storyteller who peppered lectures with unforgettable details that his former students can still conjure up at over a decade's remove. For this record of dedicated service to undergraduate teaching, Doug received the William G. McLoughlin Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences in 1994. Doug also played a key role in the life of the History Department's graduate program and trained several generations of PhD students in colonial Latin American history.Doug was a thoughtful listener with a gentle but playful sense of humor. He loved baseball and often surprised with his au courant references to popular culture. He was also a devoted uncle to his nieces and nephews and a generous colleague to many at Brown and beyond. Doug is survived by his three loving sisters—Melissa Zantello, Marge Fagan, and Marikay Cope—along with his brothers-in-law and many nieces and nephews.Donations may be made to the R. Douglas Cope Memorial Undergraduate Fund, established by the Brown History Department in honor of Doug's commitment to addressing past and present class inequities. The award will recognize outstanding low-income and first-generation history concentrators. Checks should be made payable to the Brown University History Department (memo line: Cope Prize) and may be sent to Brown University, Department of History, c/o Cherrie Guerzon, Box N, 79 Brown Street, Providence, RI 02912.