Cooper Graves

Cooper is a senior at Wakefield School in The Plains, Virginia, and will be attending the College of William & Mary this Fall, where he plans to pursue a degree in either English or History. A lifelong lover of all things history, Cooper knew that he wanted to pursue a historical topic for his senior thesis, and settled on researching the fourteenth century's Black Death and its influence on modern history. The Black Death caused unprecedented destruction. Nobody was safe—the bacterium killed indiscriminately. Upwards to half the population of Europe alone perished as a result of the plague. Such calamity indubitably influenced the world. Cooper hopes that by exploring the ramifications of the plague in his thesis, the importance of the pandemic in shaping modern history will be illuminated.