Ted Cohen | Humanities and Social Sciences | SIU

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. To hear more about his book, please visit the LASA 2021 Howard F. Cline Prize Roundtable.

His other publications have highlighted the racialization of history and culture (especially art and music) in Mexico, the United States, and other regions of the Americas. For example, see “Race, Racism, and Antiracism in Brazil and Mexico,” Latin American Research Review (2022); “Among Races, Nations, and Diasporas: Genealogies of ‘La bamba’ in Mexico and the United States,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (2017); 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). His short article “Katherine Dunham's Mexican Adventure,” The Confluence (2015) has been translated into Spanish by Antonio Saborit and published in Historias: Revista de la Dirección de Estudios Históricos (2020) as “La aventura mexicana de Katherine Dunham.”

He is currently working on two projects: an historical exploration of how racism and antiracism relate to the anthropological theory of acculturation in Mexico and the United States in the twentieth century; and a history of Mexico’s and Canada’s places in Afro-diasporic geographies and politics from the mid-nineteenth century to the creation of Black Studies as an academic discipline in the second half of the twentieth century.