Faculty
Michael Cohen
Visiting Assistant Professor of English
B.A. Dartmouth College, 2000
Ph.D. New York University, 2007
Email: mcohen1-at-macalester.edu
Michael Cohen studies nineteenth-century American literature, with a focus on poetry, particularly the social and political uses of poems in different communities and public cultures before and after the American Civil War.
He went to Dartmouth College, where he majored in English and ran on the Cross Country and Track teams. His doctoral project at NYU focused on the ways in which poetic genres like popular ballads, slave spirituals, antislavery poems, and Civil War elegies constructed new ideas about culture, history, race, and national identity in the late nineteenth century. He's interested in revealing the fundamentally public life of poems in the nineteenth-century U.S., the ways that poems functioned as items of exchange and shared meaning for ordinary people.
Some of his interests include folk poetry, particularly the study of ballads, spirituals, and songs; dialect poetry and the relations between literary genres and race; the relations between oral culture, music, and print; genre and media studies; and the critical methodology known as "history of the book," which connects the material history of printed literature with the forms of reading and meaning-making that have gone along with it.
Publications
- "Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Genres of Dialect." Forthcoming from African American Review.
- "Yankee Peddlers and Rustic Bards: Broadside Poetry and Local Culture in Nineteenth-Century America." Forthcoming from ESQ 54.1-3 (2008).
- "Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Poetry." Forthcoming from Arizona Quarterly, 2008.
- "E.C. Stedman and the Invention of Victorian Poetry." Victorian Poetry 43.2 (Summer 2005): 165-89.
Fall 2008 Courses
Spring 2008 Courses
Past Macalester Courses
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