LAWRENCE COHEN — Curriculum Vitae
Professor of Anthropology and of South & Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
email: cohen@berkeley.edu
work: Dept. of South & Southeast Asian Studies, 3140 Dwinelle, UC Berkeley
Dept. of Anthropology, 232 Anthropology & Art Practice, UC Berkeley
EDUCATION
1992 A.M., Ph.D. Anthropology, Harvard University.
1983 A.B. summa cum laude, Study of Religion, Harvard University.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
1991 “The Wives of Ganesa.” Ganesh: Studies of an Asian God.
1992 “No Aging in India: The Uses of Gerontology.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 16.
1994 “Old Age: Cultural and Critical Perspectives.” Annual Review of Anthropology 23.
1994 “Whodunit? Violence and the Myth of Fingerprints.” Configurations 2.
1995 “Toward an Anthropology of Senility.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 9.
1995 “The Pleasures of Castration.” Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture.
1995 “The Epistemological Carnival.” Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions.
1995 “Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of Modernity.” GLQ 2.
1995 “Postcolonial India and the Enormity of AIDS,” Naz ki Pukaar.
1997 “Semen, Irony, and the Atom Bomb.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 11.
1998 No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things.
1999 “Where It Hurts: Indian Material for an Ethics of Organ Transplantation.” Daedalus 128.
1999 “The History of Semen.” Medicine and the History of the Body.
2001 “The Other Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition.” Body and Society 7.
2001 “Gay Bars and Bombay’s Millennium,” Bombay Dost 8.
2002 “What Mrs. Besahara Saw: Reflections on the Gay Goonda.” Queering India.
2003 “Senility and Irony’s Age.” Social Analysis 47.
2003 “Old Age.” The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology.
2004 “Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception.” Global Assemblages.
2004 “Operability: Surgery at the Margins of the State.” Anthropology in the Margins of the State.
2005 “The Kothi Wars: AIDS…and the Morality of Classification,” Sex in Development.
2006 Thinking about Dementia. Annette Leibing and Lawrence Cohen, eds.
2007 “Song for Pushkin.” Daedalus.
2008 “Politics of Care.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22.
2008 “Science, Politics, and Dancing Boys: Propositions and Accounts.” Parallax 14.
2008 “M’s Book.” Muslim Portraits.
2009 “Lucknow Noir.” Homophobias: Lust and Loathing across Time and Space.
2010 “Ethical Publicity.” Ethical Life in South Asia.
2011 “Love and the Little Line.” Cultural Anthropology 26.
2011 “Migrant Supplementarity.” Body and Society 7.
2011 "Accusations of Illiteracy and the Medicine of the Organ." Social Research 78.
2011 “Style.” Handbook of Gender.
2012 “The Gay Guru.” The Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
2012 “Making Peasants Protestant and Other Projects.’ Medical Anthropology at the Intersections.
2013 “Foreign Operations: Reflections on Clinical Mobility in Indian Film.” Critical Mobilities.
2013 “Given Over to Demand: Excorporation as Commitment.” Contemporary South Asia 21.
2015 “Oliver’s Body.” Public Books.
2015 “The Community, the Clinic, and the Road not Taken.” The Wire.
2015 “Creativity and Exhaustion.” BioSocieties 10 (2): 268-270.
2016 “Duplicate, Leak, Deity.” Limn 6.
2016 “Transplant Melodrama.” Public Books.
2017 “Duplicate.” South Asia 40.
2019 “The Nation, De-Duplicated.” Critical Themes in Indian Sociology.
2019 “I’m Your (Fore)Man: Reflections on Risk.” Routledge Companion to Media and Risk.
2019 “India as Database: A Response to Reetika Khera.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 53.
2019 “The ‘Social’ De-Duplicated: On the Aadhaar Platform.” South Asia: 42.
2020 “Aging in California.” Somatosphere.
2020 “The Culling: Pandemic, Gerocide, Generational Affect.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 34.
2021 “Colors of Rot.” Positions Politics.
2022 “The Duplicate Malady.” South Asia 45.
2022 “Old Woman.” The People of India: New Indian Politics in the 21st Century.
2023 “A Good Death.” Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge.
2023 “Superimposition: App-based Contact Tracing.” Social Text (Periscope).
2023 “Retirement Project.” Anthropology and Humanism 48.
2024 “Geropolitics.” Biopolitics and Healing in a Mass Milieu,
2024 “The Corridor.” Pilgrimage, Place, and Pluralism: Essays in Conversation with Diana Eck.
2024 “On Thought Collectives, Revenge, and the Counterfactual.” Current Anthropology 65.
2025 “Enemies: Uneasy Accompaniments in Late Life.” JRAI 31.
2026 “Everyone Is Related.” Family Potential in Uncertain Times: Mobility, Technology, and Body.
2026 “Hailing the State from Far Away" Comparative Studies of S Asia, Africa & the Middle East 46.