Brigid Cohen is a historical musicologist who specializes in the historiography of musics and musicians in migration. Her research and teaching examine the mass dislocation of peoples over the last two centuries, addressing conditions of empire, globalization, genocide, exile, and minoritized citizenship. This intellectual program stems from her conviction that music assumes special value under the pressure of conditions of uprooting. Music serves as a mode of self-fashioning, secures new (and old) community bonds, and brings individuals together in listening, speech, and action. It also interacts in variegated ways with the silences that emerge from troubled sites of memory.
Cohen has published extensively on the politics of 20th-century avant-gardes, archive theory, histories of cosmopolitanism, postcolonial studies, 20th-century German-Jewish diasporic thought, and intersections of music, literature, and the visual arts. Her most recent book, Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2022), explores questions of displacement and citizenship through a study of New York concert avant-gardes, jazz, electronic music, and performance art in the 1950s and 1960s. This book trains its focus on the cultural-political dilemmas navigated by uprooted creators in New York as a capital of empire during the Cold War. The book addresses well-known but little understood figures (e.g., Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas), alongside less well-known composers (e. g., Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). Cohen’s emphasis on displacement began with her first book, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2012). This book is both a study of the German-Jewish émigré composer Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) and a history of modernism that focuses on experiences of migration and cross-cultural encounter— from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College. The monograph won the Lewis Lockwood Prize of the American Musicological Society for best monograph of the year by a scholar at an early career stage.
In fall 2023, Cohen will be a visiting scholar at the Humboldt University in Berlin where she will be engaged in the early stages of writing two new monographs. The first is a short book manuscript, “The Musical Vocation of Yoko Ono,” which offers musically, conceptually, and historically textured account of Yoko Ono’s self-identified vocation as a composer—an identity that others often refused to acknowledge because of racial and gender bias. This manuscript expands upon themes and historical research from Cohen’s existing writings on Ono. Her other book project, “Salon, Varieté, Archive: Sounding Empire in Berlin, 1820-1933,” offers a historiography of German music beyond the homogenizing idea of culture, or Kulturnation, through which is has often been defined. Toward that end, it focuses on three underexplored musical spaces as sites for thinking through processes of Orientalism, imperialism, migration, and hierarchies of citizenship. This book will examine musical salons, varieté theater, and phonogram archives as intercultural sites vital for the imagination of Germany’s “others” on its path to empire (and eventually totalitarianism) from the 19th century onward.
In addition to having published numerous articles, Cohen was the convener of the round table “Edward Said and Musicology Today” in Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2016). In recent years, her research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for History of Science (2017, 2018), the National Endowment for the Humanities (2014-15), Wellesley College (2014-15), and the American Academy in Berlin (2010).
A recipient of the NYU Golden Dozen Teaching Award, Cohen is an advocate for interdisciplinary teaching. She has co-taught with Hasia Diner in the NYU GSAS Public Humanities program. Together with Wendy Lee, Rosemary Quinn, and Mimi Yin, she is also part of an ongoing arts-based research group called Consent Lab sponsored by the NYU Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab Program. Cohen regularly speaks publicly about her scholarship, having delivered keynote talks at University of Sydney (2017), Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University (2017), Sibelius Academy in Helsinki (2015), and other educational institutions. She has also published and provided interviews in media outlets such as The Conversation, PBS News online, Der Tagesspiegel, BBC Radio 3, and Channel 13 New York (PBS/WNET).
