Ashley Cohen

I am a scholar of seveenteenth- and eighteenth-century England and global empire. I’m currently working on a book project entitled “Against the Law: Antinomianism and the Intellectual History of the London Hanged in the Age of the Bloody Code,” which aims to show how the radical antinomian currents of the seventeenth century provided an intellectual basis for principled opposition to the Bloody Code amongst its victims in the early eighteenth century. I currently serve as editor for The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.

My first book, The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756-1815 was published by Yale University Press in 2020. My critical edition of Lady Nugent’s East India Journal was published by Oxford University Press (2014). My articles and essays have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Comparative Literature, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Sporting Cultures, 1650-1850 (UToronto Press, 2018), and Britain’s Black Past (Liverpool UP, 2020). In 2018 I was awarded the inaugural Srinivas Aravamudan Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for my article, “The Global Indies: Historicizing Oceanic Metageographies.”

At USC, I serve as Director of Graduate Studies for the English Department’s PhD in Literature.