Deborah A. Cohen

Cohen is an innovative, wide-ranging historian of modern Europe, whose prize-winning books have helped to redefine scholarship on such topics as World War I, the welfare state and civil society in Germany and Britain (The War Come Home, 2001); the theory and methods of comparative history (Comparison and History, ed. 2004); consumerism, material culture and religious change in Britain (Household Gods, 2006), and families, privacy and social change (Family Secrets, 2013).  What unites her work is a concern with social relations.  She is interested in the relationship between individuals and society -- in particular the ways in which a close study of the behavior of individuals can illuminate society-wide transformations, from the making of social peace after the Great War to the destigmatization of illegitimacy. 

She writes regularly for The Atlantic and has published reviews in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal.  She is currently at work on a book, under contrast to Random House in the US and William Collins in the UK, about a set of American foreign correspondents who reported from interwar Europe and Asia.  Her subjects include John and Frances Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson.