Rate My Professor Deborah Cohen

Northwestern University

History Modern History Cultural History History of Religion Gender Studies Economic History

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5.04/23/2026

A role model for academic excellence.

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About Deborah

Deborah Cohen is the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University and Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. She earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, an M.A. from Berkeley in 1993, and an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1990. Cohen joined Northwestern in 2010 as Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities and Professor of History, advancing to her current endowed chair in 2020. She previously held positions as Professor of History at Brown University from 2002 to 2010, where she was promoted to full professor in 2008, and as Assistant Professor at American University from 1997 to 2002. From 2020 to 2023, she served as Chair of the History Department at Northwestern. Her research specializes in modern European history and global history, with particular focus on Britain and its empire, Germany, war and empire, religious history, gender and sexuality history, family capitalism, material culture, privacy, and the public histories of private lives. Methodologically, she employs social science-inspired comparative history and biography, addressing topics such as Anglo-Argentines, American foreign correspondents, and state-society relations.

Cohen is the author of four major books: Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War (Random House and William Collins, 2022), which received the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Nieman Foundation and Columbia School of Journalism, the Goldsmith Prize from Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa, and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, Vanity Fair, BookPage, and Booklist; Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Viking Penguin and Oxford University Press, 2013), winner of the American Historical Association's Forkosch Prize and the North American Conference on British Studies' Stansky Prize; Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), which won the Forkosch Prize and co-won the North American Conference on British Studies' Albion Prize; and The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (University of California Press, 2001), recipient of the Social Science History Association's Allan Sharlin Memorial Prize. She has held prestigious fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, National Humanities Center, Mellon Foundation, Newberry Library, and Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018, Cohen has also been honored with Northwestern's Clarence ver Steeg Faculty Award for graduate mentorship and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship for teaching excellence (2015-2018). She serves on the editorial board of Past & Present and co-edits Cambridge University Press's Modern British Histories series with Margot Finn and Peter Mandler. Cohen regularly contributes articles to The Atlantic, New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, and Wall Street Journal on topics ranging from war photography and suffrage to Winston Churchill's finances and indie rock.