Benjamin Cohen is the advisor to the Badminton Club at Lafayette College. He is also a historian, environmental studies, and Science & Technology Studies (STS) scholar. He co-hosted the internet's only undefeated podcast about small college life, Various Breads and Butters (try here too) from 2015 until its finale in 2019. He is a Professor of Engineering Studies and Environmental Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, PA and the McKelvy Scholars Faculty Advisor. In Spring 2023, he was a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton.
In work beyond campus, Cohen is a Series Editor for “Public Thinker” at Public Books, an editorial board member for MIT Press’s History for a Sustainable Future book series, and a long-ago Lists Editor at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. From 2005 until 2011, he taught in the Department of STS at U.Va., where he was a founder and director of The UVA Food Collaborative and founder and curator of the now-defunct but once grand Thornton Hall Art Gallery.
Cohen was trained as a historian and an engineer before earning a Ph.D. on the History Track of STS from Virginia Tech (2005). His graduate research on environmental history and the history of science became Notes from the Ground, set within the early American Republic. His second book, Pure Adulteration, carried that interest into the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a story about the origins
of modern food regulation and new worries over sincerity, artifice, and nature. He also co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (MIT, 2021) with Anna Zeide and Michael Kideckel. Each project works to explore the origins of modern industrial food and agriculture. In teaching, local activities, and his current book project (“How to Feed the World”), he works with students, faculty, others across campus, and community members to move beyond the limitations of that industrial system. The co-edited Technoscience and Environmental Justice (with Gwen Ottinger) is also a contribution to this second area of research.
In the time left over he writes for various forums outside the academy, some interviews, some satire, a few personal essays, and most of it on-line.
He is represented by Elise Capron at the Sandra Dijsktra Literary Agency, to whom inquiries may be sent. Here’s a cv.
Campus contact info:
304 Acopian Engineering Center
Lafayette College
Easton, PA 18042