Citation from the Award Committee:
As a scholar, as a teacher and mentor, as an institutional and disciplinary leader, and as a political activist, Cathy J. Cohen has illuminated and combatted injustices of race, gender, sexuality, class, and age in ways that have launched vital new fields of research; reformed institutions and created new ones; and inspired innumerable students, colleagues, and members of communities that have long been undervalued and underserved in the United States.
Born to a Black working-class family in Toledo, Ohio, Cathy Cohen earned her B.A. from Ohio’s Miami University and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She began her career at Yale University, where she co-created the Center for the Study of Race, Inequality and Politics and received tenure with the publication of her first pathbreaking book, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. It was a landmark study that both theorized and provided empirical evidence of how not only governmental institutions but also middle-class and religious leaders of Black communities, pressured to appear respectable in white eyes, often failed their poorer, younger, and, especially, their LGBTQ+ community members in the AIDS crisis. It was preceded by among other works, her hugely cited 1997 essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: the Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” a pioneering call for queer activists to build broader, more transformational coalitions through intersectional political approaches that fostered solidarity with those marginalized in multiple ways by prevailing standards of desirable identities.
Moving to the University of Chicago in 2002, Cohen soon launched the Black Youth Project, aided by a major grant from the Ford Foundation. Through nationwide surveys and other forms of research, it has shed unprecedented light on the norms, decision-making, and political practices of young Black people between the ages of 18 and 30, generating insights reported in Cohen’s second book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics, and also in broadly accessible fashion on the Project’s website. The Ford Foundation went on to fund her subsequent Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. At Chicago as at Yale, Cohen has mentored innumerable graduate students, both formally and informally, who have similarly gone on to become major contributors to scholarship and teaching and to institutional and political reform initiatives.
In addition to the many leadership roles Cohen has played at both Yale and Chicago, she has also provided outstanding service to the American Political Science Association. She has served as APSA Secretary and Vice President, and for APSA President Paula McClain’s Task Force on Systematic Inequalities in the Discipline, Cohen led the Burdens of Faculty of Color Working Group’s study of Tenure and Promotion Standards.
Cathy Cohen has been a tireless political activist, having served as a founding board member and co-chair of the board of the Audre Lorde Project in New York and on the boards of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press; the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies; and the Arcus Foundation. She has also been active in the Black Radical Congress, ACT UP New York, and African American Women in Defense of Ourselves, and she is a founder and executive committee member of Scholars for Social Justice, as well as a member of the collective More than Diversity at the University of Chicago.
In all these many endeavors, Professor Cathy J. Cohen has been a fearless and both passionate and compassionate fighter for greater truth and greater justice, in ways that have helped to make our discipline and our society, though still very imperfect, far better than they were before she began her distinguished career.
Cathy J. Cohen is the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and the inaugural chair of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. She formerly served as chair of the Department of Political Science, Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and Deputy Provost for Graduate Education at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two award-wining books, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press) and Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press). She is also co-editor of the anthology Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU Press) with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto.
Cohen’s articles have been published in numerous journals and edited volumes, including the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Social Text, DuBois Review and GLQ. Cohen is co-editor with Frederick Harris of the book series at Oxford University Press, Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities. She is also the recipient of numerous major research grants and is the founder and director of two public facing research projects, the GenForward Survey Project and the Black Youth Project.
Cohen is the recipient of numerous awards, including being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, being named a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, receiving the 2021 Hanes Walton, Jr. Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association, and being named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in 2021.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Kathleen Thelen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Rogers M. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania.