Olivia DrakeIn recognition of their career achievements, five faculty members are being appointed to endowed professorships, effective July 1: Stephen Angle, professor of philosophy and East Asian studies, is receiving the Mansfield Freeman Professorship in East Asian Studies, established in 1986. Lisa Cohen, associate professor of English, is receiving the Douglas J. and Midge Bowen Bennet Chair. The Bennet Chair, endowed in 2007, is awarded for a five-year term to a newly tenured associate professor exhibiting exceptional achievement and evidence of future promise. Andrew Curran, professor of French and outgoing Dean of Arts and Humanities, is receiving the William Armstrong Professorship…
The Board of Trustees recently conferred tenure to four Wesleyan faculty. Their promotions take effect July 1. They are: Lisa Cohen, associate professor of English; Abigail Hornstein, associate professor of economics; Miri Nakamura, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures; and Anna Shusterman, associate professor of psychology. Other tenure announcements may be released after the Board's May meeting. "Please join us in congratulating them on their impressive records of accomplishment," said Wesleyan President Michael Roth. Brief descriptions of their areas of research and teaching are below: Lisa Cohen joined the English Department’s creative writing faculty in Fall 2007. Her courses are…
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Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, was recently shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for her book, All We Know: Three Lives. For more than 50 years, the PEN awards have honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature across such diverse fields as fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children's literature, translation and drama. With the help of its partners and supporters, PEN will confer 16 distinct awards, fellowships, grants, and prizes in 2013, awarding nearly $150,000 to writers, editors and translators. The final winners and runners-up will be announced later this summer…
A book written by Assistant Professor of English Lisa Cohen was honored by the Biographers International Organization on April 22. Her book, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was nominated for a 2012 inaugural Plutarch Award for "best biography of the year." Named after the famous Ancient Greek biographer, the prize aims to be the genre’s equivalent of the Oscar, in that the winner will be determined by secret ballot from a list of nominees selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft. The BIO nominated 10 books for the award. The Plutarch Award will…
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) named Assistant Professor of English Lisa Cohen’s book, All We Know: Three Lives, a "2012 Finalist" in the biography category. Founded in 1974 in New York City, the NBCC is the sole award bestowed by working critics and book-review editors. A finalists’ reading will be held at 6 p.m. on Feb. 27 at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium. Winners of the National Book Critics Circle book awards will be announced on Feb. 28. In All We Know: Three Lives, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Cohen revives the forgotten lives of three women. Esther Murphy, an heiress whose…
Publishers Weekly named Assistant Professor of English Lisa Cohen’s book, All We Know: Three Lives, as one of the "Best Books of 2012." In All We Know, Publishers Weekly says "Cohen ... fully delineates the conventional biographical matters of ancestry, parents, schooling, marriages, affairs, friendships, breakups, work, and death. This well-researched, gossipy, informative, and entertaining biographical triptych is also a thoughtful, three-part inquiry into the meaning of failure, style, and sexual identity." The New York Times also named the book one of the "100 Notable books of 2012." In a book review, the NYT says "Cohen’s own idiosyncratic hybrid doesn’t disappoint. She builds a rich picture…
David LowIn this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we ask “5 Questions” of Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English and faculty fellow in the Center for the Humanities. Cohen is the author of All We Know: Three Lives, an engrossing biographical triptych about three complicated, glamorous, independent, and influential women of the last century (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2012). In a review of her new book in Businessweek, Craig Seligman writes: “ ‘All We Know’ is really much more about reflecting on lives … than about chronicling them. Experimental biography, if such a genre can be said to exist,…
Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, is the author of All We Know: Three Lives, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2012. The book is 448 pages and includes 52 illustrations and notes. In All We Know, Cohen describes three women’s glamorous choices, complicated failures, and controversial personal lives with lyricism and empathy. Esther Murphy was a brilliant New York intellectual who dazzled friends and strangers with an unstoppable flow of conversation. But she never finished the books she was contracted to write—a painful failure and yet a kind of achievement. The quintessential fan, Mercedes de Acosta had intimate…
A new book by Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, was given an enthusiastic early review in The New Yorker’s book blog on March 12. Her book, All We Know, will be published in July 2012. "Cohen’s remarkable, sui generis study about three modernist figures—Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland, for many years a fashion editor at British Vogue—is, in part, about dread, which is to say failure and fear of self-exposure, and how we accommodate our lives to suit the various shadows splashed by the sun of occasional triumph... By servicing Murphy and, in the book’s shattering final section about Madge Garland,…
In honor of the centennial of the writer Sybille Bedford, and in conjunction with The Paris Review, Lisa Cohen, assistant professor of English, organized an evening of readings of her work on March 24 in New York City. Cohen writes about Bedford in The Paris Review. Cohen’s writing has appeared in Fashion Theory, Bookforum, Ploughshares, The Boston Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her book, All We Know—portraits of the neglected modernist figures Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland—will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2012. Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) was one of the great 20th-century stylists of the English language.