William A. Cohen

William A. Cohen is Professor of English, Associate Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Studies. Previously he was Director of Undergraduate Studies (2006-09), Associate Chair (2010-12), and Chair (2012-15) of the English department. His scholarship and teaching focus on literature and culture of the Victorian period; the history of sexuality, the body, and the senses; and literary theory. He has published articles in such journals as Narrative, Victorian Literature and Culture, ELH, PMLA, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as three books. The first, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Duke University Press, 1996), investigates nineteenth-century British novels and newspaper scandals. It argues that the unspeakable status of sexuality affords writers an opportunity to develop a complex discourse—richly ambiguous, subtly coded, prolix and polyvalent—now designated by the term “literary.” This book was supported by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Wesleyan University and received widespread attention in the scholarly and popular press when it was published.

His second book, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (co-edited with Ryan Johnson, University of Minnesota Press, 2005), is an anthology of a dozen interdisci­plin­ary essays focused on London and Paris of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It proposes that the rejection of filth serves crucial functions of social management and identity formation, bringing together practices that designate some people (the poor, the foreign, the immoral) as dirty and therefore dangerous; psychological experiences of disgust and sometimes pleasurable defilement; and the phenomenology of perception. Work on this project was supported by a residential fellowship from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.

Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) offers a new approach to discussions of human embodiment in literary and cultural studies. Rather than regarding the bodily exterior as the primary location in which identity categories (such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability) are expressed, Embodied focuses on the interior experience of sensation, whereby these politics come to be felt. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and Bataille, the book charts a materialist thesis through works by Victorian writers who ceased to identify human nature with an ethereal soul or spirit, and instead presented the essence of the human as an effect of the body.

Professor Cohen is currently at work on “Intermediate French: British Literature from the July Monarchy to the Dreyfus Affair,” which considers the affective dimensions of the French language—especially when incompletely mastered—in works by English-speaking authors. One section, “Why Is There So Much French in Villette?”, has been published in ELH. “Wilde’s French” was published in Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives (University of Toronto Press, 2013), and other portions have been presented at the North American Victorian Studies Association, at the Dickens Bicentenary conference in Paris, Boulogne, Chatham, and London, at the CUNY Graduate Center Victorian symposium, and at other venues. This research has been supported by grants from the William Andrews Clark and Huntington libraries. “Arborealities: The Tactile Ecology of Hardy’s Woodlanders” was presented as a keynote at the Victorian Tactile Imagination conference (Birkbeck College, University of London) and the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, and has been published in 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. It received Honorable Mention in the North American Victorian Studies Association's Donald Gray Prize for the best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies in 2014. He was guest editor and wrote the introduction to the "Victorian Dirt" issue (winter 2015) of the peer-reviewed online journal Victorian Network. Professor Cohen received the Faculty Service Award from the Graduate English Organization in 2012. He has been an elected member of the executive committee of the Modern Language Association forum on Victorian and Early 20th Century English literature and a member of the PMLA Advisory Committee. He serves on the advisory board of Victorian Literature and Culture and of Studies in Sensory History (University of Illinois Press), as well as a reader for many other journals and university presses.