Profile: Paul Cohen
Paul Cohen, professor of history, sees himself as first and foremost a broad-based
humanist. That is why he was especially pleased when he was appointed recently
to the Patricia Hamar Boldt Professorship in Liberal Studies.
His disciplinary credentials as a historian of modern Europe are certainly first rate: the Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago; author of Freedom’s Moment: An Essay on the French Idea of Liberty from Rousseau to Foucault and Piety and Politics: Catholic Revival and the Generation of 1905-14 in France; published articles in French Historical Studies; and a member of the editorial board of the journal Contemporary French Civilization.This past year, his 1997 book Freedom’s Moment was published in a Korean translation and his review of Christopher E. Forth’s book, Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891-1918, appeared in The Journal of Modern History.
These days, however, he really is most interested in and excited about working with ideas, especially when crossing disciplinary boundaries in doing so. The recipient of the 1999 Freshman Studies Teaching Award and director of Freshman Studies from 1996 to 1998, he finds the program to be a challenging and satisfying outlet for those interests. Yet, even within the realm of the historian, he is actively exploring interdisciplinary connections and discovering anew where such a fascination with ideas may take him.
In 1999, he introduced a course, Film as History and History as Film, adding that genre to his teaching of modern history and, in doing so, exploring not only how specific moments in European history have been depicted in cinema but how film itself serves as a source of historical interpretation. That, in turn, stimulated a research interest in the portrayal of masculinity in American films after World War II, particularly cinematic representations of manhood that deviate from the Hollywood stereotypes or go against the grain, such as the male characters in Chinatown or the more recent American Beauty, and sparked plans for a future study of the history of masculinity across literature and the arts.