Ed Cohen

Ed Cohen is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. As a cultural theorist, his intellectual and pedagogical interests include gender studies, social studies of science and medicine, nineteenth-century studies, and lesbian and gay studies. He has written extensively on the history of the formations of male genders and sexualities and is the author of Talk on the Wilde Side: towards a Genealogy of the Discourses on Male Sexualities (Routledge, 1993). His current monograph, A Body Worth Defending: “Immunity” and the Bio-Politics of Bio-Medicine, will be published by Duke University Press in September 2009.  This work traces how the juridico-political rubric “immunity” came to be incorporated as bio-medical concept in the late nineteenth century and explores the contemporary implications of this genealogy for how we understand and experience ourselves as individuals, as political subjects, as humans and as living organisms.