Jeffrey J. Cohen (1964- ): A Bibliography
Prepared by Alok Yadav (version 1.1; 21 April 2025)
Jeffrey Cohen’s work, from the start, has been concerned with boundaries, margins, border zones and “the ways in which the center and the margins are mutually constitutive of each other” (Weinstock 2012: 394). The dynamic here involves acts of defamiliarization and of uncanny recognitions—and of deconstructing received polarities and hierarchies, with the aim of showing us how much we miss, how much we fail to see and take stock of when we operate within those entrenched frameworks of understanding. This may sound like a familiar modernist and poststructuralist outlook, characteristic of many scholars of his generation who entered grad school in the 1980s, but most characteristic of Cohen’s work has been the way in which he has consistently situated human concerns within a larger-than-human universe, a cosmos made up of things spiritual, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and of vital forces, imaginings, and temporalities that stretch far beyond the bounds of human experience. This sense of a larger than human universe motivates his work on medieval culture, on monsters and monster theory, and on ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He has regularly been interested in the interplay of the mental and the material, but in larger-than-human assemblages and constellations, with the forces of animation, organization, structure, and purpose coming from multiple directions, and not only or primarily from the human. The critique of humanism and the category of the human is, of course, another theme in structuralism and poststructuralism, but in Cohen’s work it has played a central rather than subsidiary role—not only as argument, but also as informing orientation and sensibility.
Cohen is the author or co-author of six books—Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (1999), Medieval Identity Machines (2003), Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: Of Difficult Middles (2006), Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015), Earth (2017), and Noah’s Arkive (2023). He is also the editor or co-editor of more than a dozen volumes, including such seminal collections as Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996), The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000), Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (2013), and The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities (2021). He was the founder and a signal contributor to the medieval studies blog, In the Middle, founded in 2006 and intensively active for a dozen years, though it seems to have drawn to a close in 2022. After a long stint in our neighborhood, at George Washington University, he has been dean of humanities at Arizona State University since 2018, where he is now also Foundation Professor of English. At Arizona State, Cohen has (among other initiatives) supported both the longstanding Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the RaceB4Race symposia sponsored by the Center since 2019.
Cohen’s CV is available here (Arizona State University website). The present bibliography works off this CV, though I have filled out missing bibliographic information, made a few corrections, and added a few items to the primary bibliography. I have also added book reviews, a few “see also” items, and secondary scholarship devoted to Cohen’s work.
View the full bibliography by clicking above title or here.
April 18, 2025