Jeffrey J Cohen
Dean of Humanities, Arizona State University • Higher education leader, scholar, and liberal arts education advocate
Credo
I believe that access to a superb education is a human right.
My experience over the years as a teacher, scholar, university administrator and writer has convinced me that deep engagement with the humanities and liberal arts are essential to leading a good life — and to success measured by something more than salary. Fostering creativity, imagination and a sense of adventure, capacious and curiosity-driven study is essential to the flourishing of democracy and the creation of a more just and sustainable world. I believe in socially engaged research and writing, and in building affirmatively at a time when institutions are being torn down. Inclusion, access and excellence are not exclusive terms. Interdisciplinary education grounded in the liberal arts enables personal fulfillment, inter-generational advancement, and community wellbeing — as well as more ethical modes of dwelling on a climate altered Earth. When anchored in career readiness and forward-thinking vision, the liberal arts are the best tools for navigating a mutable world. Colleges and universities should shape more humane futures, and I have dedicated my career to acting upon that responsibility.
As Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University, I work to build a university where scholarly excellence, student success, career preparation, public engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration reinforce one another. Some of my work in higher education has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Scholarly Kitchen, Humanities (magazine of the NEH), University World News, National Humanities Alliance, KJZZ, the American Council of Learned Societies, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Modern Language Association, Insider HigherEd and US News & World Report.
You can read what I am working on through the blog housed on this site. An overview of my scholarly work is here, and my leadership background can be found here.
Bio
I have spent my career thinking and writing about the transformative power of interdisciplinary study; the fear and desire that monsters elicit; the joy of studying languages living and dead; geology’s invitation to inhuman timeframes; and the continued vitality of the past in solving the most difficult problems of the present. I have worked relentlessly for renewed reverence for the natural world, and environmental justice. I am restless for a mended world. A science scholarship enabled me to attend the University of Rochester to study biology, but I eventually created my own major in the history of the English language and minored in classics. I am as interested in recovering from the past the knowledge we have actively worked to forget as research towards innovating the future that we must together forge.
After completing doctoral study in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University I taught in the History and Literature program there as well as in the Experimental College of Tufts University. For two decades I was a faculty member in the English Department and Program in Human Sciences at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. For fourteen of those years I served as an administrator, first as a department chair and then director of an interdisciplinary research center which I founded. As Chair of the Department of English I revitalized the research mission, advanced the diversity of the faculty, created new alliances with government agencies, arts institutions and embassies, and reinvigorated humanities study at the institution. I also secured significant new philanthropic investments to benefit our faculty and student community. I proposed and successfully funded the GW Medieval and Early Studies Institute (motto: The Future of the Past) where I created a multidisciplinary community embedded in a global city, a collaborative experiment that welcomed all who wished to participate. I departed DC in 2018 to become Dean of Humanities and Foundation Professor of English in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University, the position in which I currently serve. You can read a little bit about what I have achieved at ASU under its compelling mission of access married to excellence here and under Leadership.
I have worked with the dedicated faculty and staff of ASU to welcome a diverse population into engaged study at every level, to empower students to activate their own agency and strengthen the communities of which they are part, to grow the resources needed to match our ambitions, and to reinvent what humanistic inquiry can and should undertake. As an access-oriented Hispanic Serving Institution that enrolls numerous Native, first generation and Pell eligible students, ASU has been a welcoming place to build a truly inclusive humanities program, where career readiness is built into everything we do as we equip students to lead a good life.
Super Short Biography
Jeffrey J. Cohen is Dean of Humanities and Foundation Professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. His award winning research examines strange and beautiful things that challenge the imagination, phenomena that are alien and intimate at once. Cohen is widely published in the fields of medieval studies, monster theory, and the environmental humanities. A Guggenheim fellow, he has twice been awarded the American Council of Learned Societies fellowships, and his book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman received the 2017 René Wellek Prize in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association. In collaboration with Lindy Elkins-Tanton he co-wrote the book Earth, a re-examination of our widest home from the perspectives of a planetary scientist and a literary humanist. With environmental humanities scholar Stephanie Foote he co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities. With Julian Yates he co-wrote Noah's Arkive (2023). His next book project Monster Theory Returns will be published in early 2027.
