Liz Cohen

Lizabeth Cohen is the Howard Mumford Jones Research Professor of American Studies and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at Harvard. From 2011-18 she was the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her most recent book is Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2019, which won the Bancroft Prize for 2020. It examines the benefits and costs of the shifting strategies for rebuilding American cities after World War II by following the career of urban redeveloper Edward J. Logue, who oversaw major renewal projects in New Haven, Boston, and New York State from the 1950s through the 1980s. Cohen’s previous books include Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer, and A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. She is also co-author with David Kennedy and Margaret O’Mara of a widely used college and advanced placement United State history textbook, The American Pageant. Her writings have appeared as well in many edited volumes, academic journals, and popular venues, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the American Prospect. She is currently writing a book, co-authored with French historian Herrick Chapman, Surviving the Deindustrial Revolution: How the Americans and the French Have Reshaped Their Rust-Belt Lives and Communities Since the 1970s.

Among many awards and honors, Cohen has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians. She was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford during 2007-8 and she is a former president of the Urban History Association. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Cohen served in the history departments at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University. Cohen received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley and her A.B. from Princeton University.