Ralph Cohen Named Provost's Distinguished Professor

The highlights of Ralph Cohen’s scholarly career provide insight into what has made him an original and innovative teacher. Between 1952 and 1967, he taught in the departments of Philosophy and English at UCLA. From 1968 until 2010, he was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at the University of Virginia.  In 2010, he was named James Madison University’s first Provost’s Distinguished Professor, and in 2013 he made a gift to JMU for the establishment of The Cohen Center for the Study of Technological Humanism. His books have come out over four decades: The Art of Discrimination (1964), The Essential David Hume (1965), The Unfolding of ‘The Seasons’ (1970), New Directions in Literary History (1974), Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics (1985), The Future of Literary Theory (1989), Studies in Historical Change (1992), Histories and…:Histories Within the Human Science (1995). New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, which Cohen founded in 1969 and edited until 2009, remains the preeminent theoretical journal of its kind in the world and continues to earn significant awards into its fifth decade. Between 1988 and 1995, he founded and directed The Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change at the University of Virginia. While the Journal both traces and guides changes in theory and interpretation, the Center provided both broad inquiries into the reasons governing change and continuity—understood as the humanistic element in any discipline—and a working model for how a university might restructure itself.