Professor of Practice in the Arts, University of Chicago
Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Spring 2026
Rachel Cohen is Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago. She holds an AB from Harvard University and is the author of three critically acclaimed books: A Chance Meeting: American Encounters (New York Review of Books Classics, 2024), Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade (Yale, 2013), and Austen Years (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020). An avid essayist, Cohen’s work focuses largely on the lives and work of visual artists and writers—their friendships, patterns of influence among them, and the work they make. Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Apollo, New York Times, The Nation, Threepenny Review, The Believer, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, as well as in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize anthologies. Cohen has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Academy Activities
Feb
19
2026
Anna-Maria Kellen Lecture
Facing Mortality in Gardens along the Seine
The remarkable reverberations of three artists at work.
Feb
19
2026
Facing Mortality in Gardens along the Seine
Claude Monet painted some of his most luminous water lily canvases in his gardens at Giverny, not far away from the front in WWI, with gunfire, cannon, and ambulances within earshot. Fifty years later, just down the Seine at Vétheuil, Joan Mitchell preferred the yellows of dying sunflowers as she p ...
Feb
16
2026
Fellow Spotlight: Rachel Cohen
Rachel Cohen is Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago. She is at work on a fourth book, “Time in Pieces: Artists at Work,” a study of how historical painters and print-makers conceive of and represent time, examining work by Paula Modersohn-Becker, Ruth Duckworth, and Je ...