Professor Mitchell Cohen Named a 2010-2011 Leon Levy Biography Fellow at CUNY Graduate Center

Mitchell Cohen, Professor of Political Science, has been named a Leon Levy Biography Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. Cohen, who will use his fellowship to work on a political biography of the composer Richard Wagner, is one of only four individuals nationwide selected as a 2010-2011 Biography Fellow.

Established in 2006 to raise the profile of biography within the academy and cultivate interdisciplinary discussion about the biographer’s craft, the Leon Levy Center supports the work of both established and emerging biographers. Professor Cohen’s co-winners of this prestigious award include Jed Perl, art critic of the New Republic, Claudia Roth Pierpont, staff writer for the New Yorker, and author Michael Massing.

Baruch College Political Science professor Mitchell Cohen spent the month of January 2010 as a visiting Director of Studies with the prestigious Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sociales (The School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences), a French institution for social science research and higher education. As part of his visiting duties with the School, Cohen gave three graduate talks, two of which focused on his research on political ideas in opera, the subject of an upcoming book that his brought him to France many times before. The naming of visiting directors of studies is done by faculty vote and recipients are official guests of France during their time with the School.

Cohen also gave a talk at the Ecole on "Irving Howe and the New York Intellectuals." Howe, a leading figure in the American intellectual world until his death in 1993, was the founder of Dissent Magazine. Professor Cohen was co-editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1991-2009 and still serves on its editorial board. His related article, "What is to Be Learned? Thinking About 1989," appeared as the lead story in the fall 2009 issue. (Prof. Cohen covered the overthrow of communism on the ground in East Berlin and Budapest for Dissent in 1989).