Margaret Cohen
Margaret Cohen is a scholar of transatlantic literary and cultural modernity, with particular expertise in the history of the novel and the oceans. Her most recent book, The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), was named an outstanding academic title of the year by Choice. Her The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) was awarded the Louis R. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the George and Barbara Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of the Narrative. She is also the author of Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), which received the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in French and Francophone literature.
She is co-editor of two collections on the European novel: The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel with Carolyn Dever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre with Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). She edited and translated Sophie Cottin's best-selling novel of 1799, Claire d'Albe (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003), and has edited a new critical edition of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary that appeared with W.W. Norton in 2004. In 2019, her co-edited The Aesthetics of the Undersea appeared (Routledge). She is general editor of A Cultural History of the Seas (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), and she is volume editor of A Cultural History of the Seas in the Age of Empire, the fifth volume of this six volume set spanning from antiquity to the present.
An important part of Cohen’s current work involves building intellectual infrastructures for the growing interdisciplinary field of ocean humanities. In 2025 she was awarded an NEH Public Humanities Initiatives Grant to develop and implement an oceanic humanities curriculum. This initiative builds on two multi-year awards she received in 2023 from Stanford, which focused on creating connections and fostering collaboration between the ocean humanities and the ocean sciences, the Woods Institute Big Ideas for Oceans award and the Public Humanities Seed Grant.
Center for the Study of the Novel podcasts
Imagining the Oceans Cantor Arts Center (video)
Stanford Report: A Cultural History of the Seas
The Novel and the Sea (lecture, Sydney Environment Institute)
