Dr Joanna Cohen
Lecturer in History
Location: Arts Two 4.10email: j.cohen@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0) 207 882 8363
Dr Joanna Cohen gained a BA from Queens’ College, Cambridge and an MA from Northwestern University before pursuing doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. Her PhD examined the connections between consumption and citizenship in America between the Revolution and the end of the Civil War. Prior to joining Queen Mary in 2009 she was an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Penn Program in Democracy, Citizenship and Constitutionalism. She has taught American History at Penn for several years and has held fellowships at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Program in Early American Economy and Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the American Antiquarian Society and the Harvard Business School.
Research interests:
Dr Cohen’s research explores the intersections between consumption, economic policy and civic rights and obligations in Nineteenth-Century America. She is currently completing a book manuscript that examines how middle-class consumers’ desires and expectations helped to dismantle the political economy of the early republic and transform the meaning of good economic citizenship before 1865.
She is also developing two new projects. One is a cultural history of tariffs, explored through a regional lens in Nineteenth-Century America and the other is a collaborative project that interrogates the political, economic and cultural meaning of silk production in America.
Postgraduate supervision:
Dr Cohen can offer supervision on a range of topics in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century American history. She would particularly welcome inquiries from those interested in pursuing the history of capitalism, consumption, gender, political economy and material culture.
Publications:
“‘The Right to Purchase is as Free as the Right to Sell.’ Defining consumers as citizens in the auction-house conflicts of the early republic.” Journal of the Early Republic (forthcoming Spring 2010).
“Images and Imagination: Consumers in Commercial Lithography.” The Book (March 2008, Number 74).
“Stranger’s fever in Charleston, South Carolina: a mistaken diagnosis?” The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 37, 2007, 273-6. With J Cohen, BSMS, UK.