Lizabeth Cohen

Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in Harvard University's history department. Currently, she teaches courses in 20th century America, material and popular culture, and gender, urban, and working-class history. She is also the director of the undergraduate program in history.

Life and academic career

Cohen grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey. She earned her A.B. degree from Princeton University, and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Cohen worked as a secondary school teacher and in history and art museums. She was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 1986 to 1992, and at New York University from 1992 to 1997.

She is best known for Making a New Deal, a book that pioneered the social history of 20th century American politics and, more recently, A Consumers' Republic, about suburbanization and the way that people's identities as consumers became their primary political nexus after World War II. A Consumer's Republic begins with her recollections of growing up in suburban New Jersey and draws from extensive research in archives in the Garden State.

Awards and memberships

Cohen has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Her 1990 article, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s," won the American Studies Association's Constance Roarke Prize for the best article published in the journal American Quarterly.

Her 1990 book, Making a New Deal, won the Bancroft Prize in 1991 for the best book published in American history and the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Published works

Solely authored books

• A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. ISBN 0375707379
• Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1930. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0521381347

Solely authored articles

• "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s." American Quarterly. 41:1 (March 1989).
• "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America." American Historical Review. 101 (October 1996).

Sources

• Bailey, Thomas (2002). The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (12th Ed. ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 0-618-24732-7. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• American Studies Association Web site
• Lizabeth Cohen faculty page, Department of History, Harvard University
• Philip Taft Labor History Book Award
• Lizabeth Cohen discusses her book A Consumers' Republic