Michael Cohen

Associate Professor, English, UCLA

Michael Cohen is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UCLA, where he teaches and studies the literature of the transatlantic nineteenth century. His work focuses on poetry between roughly the 1790s and the 1890s, primarily in the United States, but also across the broader English-speaking world. He is most interested in the ways that people used poems: the means by which they received and circulated them (via books, broadsides, letters, oral recitation, and so on), the reading practices that made up their encounters with them (memorization, group reading, singing), and the theories of genre and media that informed the way they understood poems. He offers courses on many aspects of nineteenth-century literature, poetry, and theory, including courses on early American literature, Atlantic Romanticism, American poetry, transcendentalism, “old media,” and authors such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, as well as graduate seminars on poetry, lyric theory, and the history of reading.