Mark Nathan Cohen
University Distinguished Professor (and Distinguished Teaching Professor) of Anthropology, Emeritus
Dr. Cohen is the only professor in all of SUNY to have been awarded two different distinguished ranks.
Dr. Cohen holds an A. B. from Harvard College (1965) and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1971). He has been a fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (1978-79) and has won a J. S. Guggenheim Fellowship (1985) for study at Cambridge University, UK, and a Fulbright Fellowship at Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1990).
Cohen specializes in the analysis of cultural evolution in prehistory; human ecology; the evolution of disease and health; demographic archaeology; and paleopathology. He has advanced two major theses contradicting orthodoxy: first, that much human “progress” results not from the pull of invention but rather from the push of increasing need or demand stimulated in large part by the growth of the human population; and second, that most such “progress” has been bought at the cost of declining rather than improving human health. He has also written and spoken out repeatedly about the problems and baises of American culture.
Cohen is author or senior editor of eight books including The Food Crisis in Prehistory (1977) translated into Spanish; Paleopathology at the origins of Agriculture (ed.1984); Health and the Rise of Civilization (1989) translated into Japanese and Chinese; and Culture of Intolerance, winner of the annual Bruno Brand award from the Simon Weisenfeld Foundation of New York. His work is in use in at least 37 countries from Chile through the Europe, East Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, to Mongolia.
