Ashley Cohen

Associate Professor of English
Ashley Cohen

Biography

I work at the intersection of eighteenth-century, postcolonial, and South Asia studies. My first monograph, The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture, 1756-1815 is forthcoming from Yale University Press (Fall 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 LiteratureThe Eighteenth Century: Theory and InterpretationSporting 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.”

I am currently working on an English translation of Yashpal’s Hindi novel, Manushya Ke Roop (1949), as well two monographs: “The Exploited Eighteenth Century: Practicing Freedom in Capitalist England, 1647-1789,” and “Buddhist Marxisms: The Politics of Materialism in 20th-Century Hindi Literature.”

I offer courses on colonialism, postcolonialism, British Literature, and South Asian literature.