This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, UMass Lowell, NECC, the Catherine McCarthy Memorial Trust Fund, the ECCF—Rosman Family Fund, and the Lawrence Cultural Council, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
Lizabeth Cohen
Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Department of History
Harvard University
"The Planners and the People: Boston's Urban Renewal Revisited"
An expert on 20th-century American social and political history, Lizabeth Cohen’s current book project, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age, considers the benefits and costs of rebuilding American cities through the life and career of urban planner Edward J. Logue, who contributed to major redevelopment projects across the Northeast, including the “New Boston” that emerged in the 1960s.
She is the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History and the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her next book, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, explored how an economy of mass consumption shaped social life, culture, and politics following World War II. Cohen has published widely in top history and urban studies journals, winning numerous awards and distinctions. Her writings have also appeared in edited collections and popular venues including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the American Prospect, and the Boston Herald. She is also coauthor with David Kennedy of a widely used United States history college textbook, The American Pageant.
Cohen has been a longtime member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Standing Committee on the Status of Women and served on the Harvard Task Force on Women in 2005.
Among her many honors and awards, Cohen has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2001, she served as president of the Urban History Association. Cohen received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master’s and doctorate in American history from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dean Lizabeth Cohen joined the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in July 2011.
Photo credit: Kathleen Dooher