Sande Cohen

Who is Sande Cohen?

Sande Cohen is a historian and a former instructor of critical studies at the California Institute for the Arts, focusing on history and historiography.

Cohen, who was born in San Francisco, received a B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in history from UCLA. His most recent work is titled History Out of Joint: Essays on the Use and Abuse of History, Johns Hopkins Press, 2006. That book was divided in two sections: the first five chapters offered a critique of the ways in which history is mythed-up and abused in everyday practices, e.g. a chapter focused on the mainland Chinese attempts to twist history into the notion that Taiwan was always part of "china," while the five chapters of the second part of the book discuss the implications of French Theory for historiography. A special issue of the journal Rethinking History published essays on Cohen's writings. His first book, Historical Culture, was the first semiotic critique of historical representation; his next book, Academia and the Luster of Capital was a series of essays on contemporary intellectual life, with one chapter on the politics of hiring and firing of professors in American institutions.