Meet 2020 Carnegie Fellow Cathy J. Cohen, University of Chicago

The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program recognizes an exceptional group of both established and emerging scholars, journalists, and authors with the goal of strengthening U.S. democracy, driving technological and cultural creativity, exploring global connections and global ruptures, and improving both natural and human environments. 

Cathy J. Cohen, a political scientist, is the David and Mary Winton Green Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Much of her work concerns women and black people in politics. She is the founder of the Black Youth Project, which conducts the GenForward survey of young adults across the country every two months. GenForward, which focuses on how race and ethnicity shape the way the respondents experience and think about the world, will form the basis of Dr. Cohen’s Carnegie project. Also a political activist, Dr. Cohen was one of the founders of the Audre Lorde Project in New York and is the author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999).