Monica Cohen

Monica Feinberg Cohen specializes in fiction of the long nineteenth century. Her teaching and research interests include Victorian culture, gender studies, book history, media studies, the nineteenth-century stage, and adaptation theory. She has written two books, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home (Cambridge University Press 1998) and Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-century Popular Culture (University of Virginia Press 2018). 

Cohen has published numerous articles and reviews in academic journals, including Dickens Studies Annual, the Journal of Victorian Culture, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Review of English Studies, Studies in English Literature, Studies in the Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Studies. She is a contributor to the Oxford Bibliographies On-line, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Victorian Women Novelists and the “Woman Question” (Cambridge UP), the Encyclopedia of the Novel (Fitzroy Dearborn), the MLA Guide to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park, the MLA Guide to Teaching Austen’s Persuasion, and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. She has written introductions to reprints of Oliver Twist (Race Point), Emma (Barnes and Noble), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Barnes and Noble), and The Old Curiosity Shop (Barnes and Noble).  In 2022, she served as guest editor for a special issue of the Victorian Popular Fictions Journal focused on the radically inclusive literary markets that inadequate copyright law afforded. 

She is the recipient of the 2009 Tony Hilfer Prize for most outstanding essay to appear in Texas Studies in Language and Literature and has served as an MLA Special Delegate representing Women in the Profession from 2013 to 2016. Cohen holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from Columbia.