Ted Cohen | Humanities and Social Sciences | SIU

Ted Cohen (BA, Yale University; Ph.D., University of Maryland, College Park) is an intellectual and cultural historian of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is interested in situating Mexico and the United States in transnational and global histories about the interethnic and interdisciplinary dimensions of race, racism, and antiracism.

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 received 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 continued these interests in the histories of music, art, dance, and anthropology. 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.”

Most recently, he co-edited, with Nicole von Germeten, the first English-language book on post-emancipation Mexico, Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century: Slavery, Freedom, and the Writing of History (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Moving from the colonial period to the twentieth-century, it charts the intertwined histories of Mexican anti-Blackness and the social, intellectual, cultural, and environmental ways by which African-descended Mexicans situated themselves in a self-proclaimed raceless nation. It reconsiders how and why the identity politics of post-independence Mexico has hindered, if not hidden, the resistance, rebellion, and survival strategies of the descendants of free and enslaved peoples after the abolition of slavery and caste.

He has two current short projects. His essay “Translating Home: Langston Hughes, José Mancisidor, and the Contexts of Diaspora” explores Hughes's engagement with Mexico and Mexicans from 1919 into the 1940s as a means to contextualize his translation of Mancisidor's short story “El regreso de Juan” as “Home” in 1935. He is beginning an article that traces the history of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous integration in Mexico in relation to global theories of culture change in the social sciences, chiefly around integration and acculturation, a project that is a stepping stone toward his next book.

His second monograph tentatively titled Antiracism's Politics, Racism's Definitions: A Global History follows the development and application of anthropological theory of acculturation—a theory of cultural contact and exchange developed in the 1930s—from the United States to Mexico, South Africa, England, Cuba, and beyond. It examines how acculturation represented antiracism's possibilities and racism's shapeshifting tenacity in assorted disciplinary, national, and historical contexts, especially in response to the Second World War and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Using Mexican, Latin American, and global histories as windows into US racial mythologies, histories, and politics, Antiracism's Politics, Racism's Definitions traces acculturation's application to reveal the historical evolution of racism and antiracism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.