Deborah Cohen received a 2019 Botstiber Fellowship to finish her book about American foreign correspondents who spent their formative working years in Austria and the territories of the former Hapsburg empire.

Her subjects — John Gunther, Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, and H.R. Knickerbocker — counted among the most influential writers of their day.  Seeking the shared terrain between international history and the history of the emotions, Cohen will investigate the relationship between inner lives and geopolitics from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Deborah Cohen is Professor of History and Peter B. Ritzma Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University.  She has written books on veterans after the First World War (The War Come Home), British consumerism (Household Gods) and on secrecy, privacy and families (Family Secrets).  She writes regularly for The Atlantic and has published reviews in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal.