Cohen, Michael C.
Assistant Professor
Humanities
Tel: 310.825.4173
Fax: 310.267.4339
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Education

PhD: New York University, 2007
BA: Dartmouth College, 2000

Interests

I teach and study the literature of the transatlantic nineteenth century. More specifically, my work focuses on poetry between roughly the 1790s and the 1890s, primarily in the United States, but also across the broader English-speaking world. I am most interested in the ways that people used poems: the material means by which they received and circulated them (via books, broadsides, letters, oral recitation, and so on), the reading practices that made up their encounters with them (memorization, group reading, singing), and the theories of genre and media that informed the way they understood poems. Together, this project seeks to create a social history of poetry, which combines careful attention to poems with an account of the life of that poetry in the nineteenth century.

I teach courses on many aspects of nineteenth-century literature, poetry, and theory, including courses on early American literature, Atlantic Romanticism, American poetry, transcendentalism, dialect poetry, ballads, "old media," and authors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Publications

“Contraband Singing: Poems and Songs in Circulation during the Civil War.” American Literature 82.2 (2010): 271-304

“Peddlers, Poems, and Local Culture: The Case of Jonathan Plummer, a ‘Balladmonger’ in Nineteenth-Century New England.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1-4 (2008): 9-32

“Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Poetry.” Arizona Quarterly 64.3 (2008): 1-29