Jesse S. Cohn, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

Director of Graduate Studies for English

Introduction

Jesse Cohn teaches in the Department of English, publishing research on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, popular culture, theory, and the cultural history of anarchism.

Research Overview

Dr. Cohn’s research looks at the way people have created and contested representations: both artistic and political. As such, his work is interdisciplinary, regarding literary and cultural works as, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, “equipment for living” — and for changing the way we live.

I love how often a single book, a single theme, even a single word can suddenly appear to be the key to everything, bringing the world into focus. And then the vertigo you get when you take off those lenses and try on another pair -- and the world is new again.

Select Publications

Author, Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848-2011 (AK Press, 2015)

Translator, A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze (Minor Compositions, 2019)

Co-Editor, special issue of Democratic Communiqué: “Media of Crisis, Criticism, and Opposition: Tactical Media in the Struggle for Social Change” (with Rhon Teruelle)

Teaching Focus

He teaches composition and first-year experience courses, literary theory and research methods, popular genres (science fiction and fantasy, film, the graphic novel, humor), and contemporary literature.