Ted Cohen
Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History
Ted Cohen (BA, Yale University; Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park) is a historian of Latin America and the African diaspora. He is interested in the racialization of culture, space, and knowledge in regions of the Americas not typically associated with blackness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
His first book, Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020), explores how Mexican historians, poets, artists, musicians, archaeologists, and ethnographers and their colleagues abroad, especially in the United States and Cuba, integrated Afro-diasporic cultures, methodologies, and politics into Mexican nation-state formation after the Mexican Revolution. It is the co-winner of the 2020 Howard F. Cline Prize in Mexican History from the Latin American Studies Association and received an honorable mention for the best book prize in the social sciences from the Mexico Section of LASA.
He has also published: “Among Races, Nations, and Diasporas: Genealogies of ‘La bamba’ in Mexico and the United States” in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (2017); “Katherine Dunham’s Mexican Adventure” in The Confluence (Fall/Winter 2015); and, with Mary Kay Vaughan, “Brown, Black, and Blues: Miguel Covarrubias and Carlos Chávez in the United States and Mexico” in Open Borders to a Revolution: Culture, Politics, and Migration, edited by Jaime Marroquín, Adela Pineda Franco, and Magdalena Mieri (2013).