Lizabeth Cohen
![]() |
Lizabeth Cohen | |
---|---|
Alma mater | Princeton University University of California, Berkeley |
Occupation | Academic |
Employer | Harvard University |
Lizabeth Cohen is the current Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard University, as well as the Dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.[1] Currently, she teaches courses in 20th-century America, material and popular culture, and gender, urban, and working-class history.[2] She has also served as the Chair of the History Department at Harvard and director of the undergraduate program in history.[3]
Life and academic career
Cohen grew up in Paramus, in Bergen County, New Jersey.[4] She earned her A.B. degree from Princeton University, and both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.[1]
Cohen rose from the position of assistant to associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University between 1986 and 1992 and served as associate professor and full professor at New York University between 1992 and 1997, before joining the faculty at Harvard. She was appointed the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University for the 2007-08 academic year, and is an honorary fellow of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute.[5]
Cohen authored Making a New Deal, a book about the social history of 20th-century American politics.[citation needed] In that book, a case study of Chicago, Cohen argues that working-class urban residents found a common identity as Americans and as New Dealers as the result of their incorporation into a burgeoning mass culture and especially as the result of the devastating effects of the Depression on urban ethnic stores, businesses, and institutions. Cohen also offers a provocative argument about the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the 1930s. She contends that a working-class "culture of unity" broke down ethnic divisions and animosities and made possible widescale industrial unionization.[6]
Cohen's analysis of working-class popular culture (shopping, movie-going, and radio) during the 1920s was a pioneering effort in the study of vernacular consumerism,[citation needed] a theme that she developed with more of a political focus in her most recent book, A Consumers' Republic. Through a deeply documented history of urban and suburban New Jersey, embedded in a larger analysis about the transformation of post-New Deal liberalism, Cohen explores the ways that people's identities as consumers shaped their politics after World War II. Building on her interests on architecture, planning, and the built environment, the book is particularly noteworthy for its engagement with earlier work on the politics of suburbanization by scholars like Kenneth T. Jackson. Cohen explores such topics as the rise of shopping malls, the emergence of a consumers' rights movement, and the relationship of consumerism to civil rights activism in the mid-twentieth century. 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.[7]
Awards and memberships
Cohen has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow, a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. She has also served as President of the Urban History Association.[8]
Her 1990 article, "Encountering Mass Culture at the Grassroots: The Experience of Chicago Workers in the 1920s," won the American Studies Association's Constance Rourke 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.[9][10]
Published works
- Bailey, Thomas; David M. Kennedy; Lizabeth Cohen (2002). The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (12th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 0-618-24732-7.
- A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. ISBN 0-375-70737-9
- Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-521-38134-7
References
- ^ a b "Cohen named dean of Radcliffe". Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 2017-08-10.
- ^ "The Future of the Consumer-Driven Economy". Adage.com. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
- ^ "Keynote Speaker: Lizabeth Cohen - Lawrence History Center". Lawrencehistorycenter.org. Retrieved 10 August 2017.
- ^ Oshinsky, David M. "Charge It!", The New York Times, March 2, 2003. Accessed September 15, 2011. "Cohen belongs to the postwar baby boom generation. Raised in Paramus, N.J., an epicenter of tract housing and highway shopping malls, she has used the experience of the Garden State to probe the larger issues of postwar economic change."
- ^ "New Dean". Thecrimson.com. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
- ^ "Review". Cornell.edu. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
- ^ "Brief History". Harvard.edu. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
{{cite web}}
: Unknown parameter|deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (help) - ^ "Interim Dean". Harvardmagazine.com. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
- ^ "Finalists". Pulitzer.org. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
- ^ "Lizabeth Cohen". Penguinrandomhouse.com. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
External links
- People from Paramus, New Jersey
- Princeton University alumni
- University of California, Berkeley alumni
- American historians
- Historians of the United States
- Harvard University faculty
- Labor historians
- Living people
- People from Scarsdale, New York
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Guggenheim Fellows
- American women historians
- Scarsdale High School alumni
- Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professors of American History