An Old History Teacher Who Still
Who am I?
I'm a retired professor of modern European history with a special interest in the history of ideas and in how film relates to history. I taught at Lawrence University from 1985 to 2022 during which time I won two teaching awards.
What am I doing?
I teach short virtual seminars through the Lawrence University Bjorklunden platform. I teach in-person once per year. Since I find lectures boring and discussions exciting, participants in my seminars engage actively with the topics at hand.
Why do I do this?
While I’ve retired from teaching officially, my love of teaching has not retired. My greatest passion is to grapple with challenging works by brilliant and controversial authors and make them accessible to my students. Some examples are:
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Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
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Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
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Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
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Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Existentialism?
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Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
I’m also a film buff and teach courses on how films reflect their historical eras and help shape them. Some examples are:
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The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
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The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)
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Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
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Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
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Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
Photo by Anne M. Rausch Photography
Publications
Piety and Politics
Catholic Revival and the Generation of 1905-1914 in France
Freedom's Moment
An Essay on the French Idea of Liberty from Rousseau to Foucault
Catch me via my Substack newsletter, ‘Cohen’s Classics’. Listen to me briefly discuss and decipher the works of some favorite intellectual and creative eagles: Marx’s Early Writings, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, for example.
Catch me via my Substack newsletter, ‘Cohen’s Classics’. Listen to me briefly discuss and decipher the works of some favorite intellectual and creative eagles: Marx’s Early Writings, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, for example.
Catch me via my Substack newsletter, ‘Cohen’s Classics’. Listen to me briefly discuss and decipher the works of some favorite intellectual and creative eagles: Marx’s Early Writings, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, for example.
Catch me via my Substack newsletter, ‘Cohen’s Classics’. Listen to me briefly discuss and decipher the works of some favorite intellectual and creative eagles: Marx’s Early Writings, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, for example.
Awards
Lawrence University Faculty Convocation Award, 2017
Lawrence University Excellence in Teaching Award, 2008
Lawrence University Freshman Studies Teaching Award, 1998-1999