She was awarded an English Speaking Union and Fulbright Fellowship for graduate study at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, where, in 1972, she completed her Ph.D dissertation on the Italian printmaker and draftsman Pietro Testa.
[3] Her focus at the helm, as stated in an April 2010 Washington Post feature on the Center, has been to encourage the intellectual expansion of CASVA into a place that endeavors to study “all of art and visual culture, for all of time, for all the globe.”[8] Following the example of dean Millon, Cropper contributes to CASVA's research by undertaking a long-term project with an international team of scholars intended to provide access to primary research materials for the field.
[13] She has served on several fellowship committees outside CASVA, including those for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.
Cropper is interested in the relationship of theory to practice in the early modern period, and has been committed to an understanding of the role of literacy among artists, taking seriously their reasoning about their production.
The relevance of biography to artistic production is a focus of Cropper's research, whether into the difficult and disorderly life of Artemisia Gentileschi or the stoic persistence of Nicolas Poussin.
As Cropper has asserted, painters in 17th century Italy “faced the very problem of their relationship to tradition and authority and were for the first time compelled to claim their individuality in a historical continuum.”[14] Cropper is married to Charles Dempsey, former chair and professor emeritus in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, who also specializes in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art.