Dr Joanna Cohen
Reader in American History
Email: j.cohen@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 8363
Room Number: ArtsTwo 4.10
Profile
I gained my BA from Cambridge and my MA from Northwestern University before moving to Philadelphia in 2003 to do my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.
Living in the city where the United States was born fostered my fascination with the history of American citizenship; research in New York furthered my love of Manhattan’s historic department stores.
Research
Research Interests:
My first book, Luxurious Citizens: Consumption and Civic Belonging in Nineteenth Century America, (Penn Press, 2017) charts the creation of the citizen-consumer in the US before the Civil War. It reveals how merchants, manufacturers, retailers, advertiser and shoppers themselves attempted to define civic virtue through both personal and national shopping habits, resulting in a vision of citizenship that to this day positions consumption as an American virtue and entitlement. As part of this project, my work on redefining pleasure as part of the commercial political economy published in the "Winterthur Portfolio" won the 2014 Grier Prize for best article.
My new project "Lost Property: Loss and Longing in Civil War America" asks how Americans learned to feel "properly" about the traumas of losing their property in the nineteenth century. Stretching from the Gold Rush through to Reconstruction, the project explores the ways in which the experiences of losing property remade ideas about value, possession and legal protections in nineteenth century America. I have been awarded fellowships at the Huntington Library and Newberry Library to work on this project, and I am currently completing an article on how the victims of the New York City Draft Riots challenged ideas of commercial value as they sought restitution for their things.
Previously I completed a project that explored how people “came to terms” with the ends of conflicts in the Atlantic World. Privileging visual and material culture as a source, this project asks how people made their peace with violence and war through the things and images they had in their lives. This project received funding from the McNeil Centre in Early American History. Emotional history of Capitalism American Capitalism and Political Economy US Citizenship Consumption and Consumerism in the Atlantic World Visual and Material Culture in the US
Publications
- "Seeing Worth and Worth Seeing: Capitalism, Race, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century America," Reviews in American History (link is external) 48:1 (March 2020): 27-35.
- “You have no flag out yet!” Commercial Connections and Patriotic Emotions in the Civil War North,” Journal of Civil War History (link is external) 9:3 (September 2019): 378-409.
- Luxurious Citizens: Consumption and Civic Belonging in Nineteenth Century America (link is external)(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
- “To Catch the Public Taste”: Interpreting American Consumers in the Era of Atlantic Free Trade, 1783-1854,” in The Atlantic World (link is external) ed. D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and William O’ Reilly (London and New York: Routledge, 2015): 573-596.
- “Promoting Pleasure as Political Economy: The Transformation of American Advertising, 1800 to 1850.” The Winterthur Portfolio (link is external), 48:2/3, Representations of Economy: Lithography in America from 1820 to 1860 (Summer/Autumn 2014): 163-190.
- “Ephemeral Loyalties? Consumption, Commerce and Jeffersonian Politics, 1806-1815.” The Readex Report (link is external), (November 2011, 6/4).
- “ ‘The Right to Purchase is as Free as the Right to Sell.’ Defining consumers as citizens in the auction-house conflicts of the early republic.” The Journal of the Early Republic (link is external), 30: 1 (Spring 2010), 25 – 62.
- “Images and Imagination: Consumers in Commercial Lithography,” The Book, (March, 2008, Number 74).
- “Stranger’s fever in Charleston, South Carolina: a mistaken diagnosis? The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, (link is external) 37, 2007: 273-6. With J. Cohen, BSMS, UK.
Reviews
- Selling the Sights: The Invention of the Tourist in American Culture. By Will B. Mackintosh. (New York: NYU Press, 2019). Journal of the Early Republic, forthcoming.
- War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era. Edited by Joan E. Cashin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018 Journal of the Civil War Era 9:4 (Dec. 2019): 650-52.
- The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy. By Jane T. Merritt. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 143:2 (April 2019): 221-22.
- Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America by Jennifer L. Anderson, Enterprise and Society (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2012) 18:4 (Dec. 2017), 988-991.
- Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America (link is external)ed. Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) Journal of American Studies 50:2 (May 2016): E22.
- The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (link is external) by Jessica M. Lepler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Reviews in History no1914 DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1914
- Being American in Europe, 1750-1850 (link is external) by Daniel Kilbride (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) American Nineteenth Century History 16:2 (2015): 213-215.
- The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in America (link is external) by Molly McCarthy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013) Journal of American Studies 48:3, July 2013, E77.
- The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (link is external)by Kate Haulman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2013) The William and Mary Quarterly 70:1, January 2013: 197-200.
- Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (link is external)by Judith Giesberg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) American Nineteenth Century History 12:3 (September 2011): 362-364.
- A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (link is external) David Jaffee (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. (July 2011)
- The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (link is external). By Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009 and First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence. By Sheila L. Skemp. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) The Journal of the Early Republic(link is external), 30: 4, Winter 2010, 647-654
Supervision
I welcome applications from candidates wishing to pursue doctoral research in the following areas:
- Nineteenth Century American History especially:
- Capitalism
- Consumption and consumer culture
- Culture, visual culture
Public Engagement
I was a 2014 BBC3/New Generation Thinker and subsequently have made appearances on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, as well as in a BBC short film on the history of shoddy. Most recently I was interviewed by Helen Carr for her podcast "Hidden Histories." I have also spoken at the Freethinking Festival, at Sage Gateshead, the York Festival of Ideas and appeared at the Proms for an "Interval Shorts." I have published in The Conversation and History Today (link is external). I am a member of the Nominating Committee for the Society of the Historians of the Early Republic, and I have peer reviewed for various university presses as well as "The Journal of the Civil War Era," and "Frontiers."