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Adrienne J. Cohen
Curriculum Vitae
Department of Anthropology
Colorado State University
1787 Campus Delivery
Fort Collins, CO 80523–1787
adrienne.cohen@colostate.edu
TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS
Political anthropology; postcolonial Africa; urban studies; critical dance studies; postsocialism; semiotics; aesthetics and politics; anthropology of sport; body cultures; critical environmentalisms
EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology, 2016, Yale University, New Haven, CT
M.Phil in Sociocultural Anthropology, 2014, Yale University, New Haven, CT
M.S. Ed. in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, 2006, Long Island University, New York, NY
B.A. in International/Intercultural Studies and Studio Art, 2001, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
2024- present Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University
2018- 2024 Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University
2016-2018 Special Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Colorado State University
PUBLICATIONS
Book
2021. Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea. The University of Chicago Press.
*Recognition: Winner, 2022 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award, Dance Studies Association *Reviews: African Studies Review, Anthropos, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Dance Research Journal, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute
Peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters
2025 (Revising to Resubmit) “Theorizing Material Qualities in Anthropocene Research.” American Anthropologist.
2025 (Accepted) “What makes a person? Inalienability, Value, and Personhood in Anthropological Theory” Anthropological Theory Commons (Short-Form Theory).
2025 (Forthcoming) “Rock Climbing as Lithic Ethnography: Animacy, Aesthetics, and Deep Time.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.
2025 “Quantities of Qualia: Stone Athletes and the Ethnography of Intensity.” Current Anthropology, 66(1): 29-49.
2023 “Multimodal Feminist Testimony: on Ambiguity, Embodiment, and Evidence in Guinea.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12(3): 895-899.
2023 A. Cohen & Paul Ugor. “Introduction: African Youth, Popular Arts, and Cultural Politics in Everyday Life.” Critical African Studies, 15(2):125-133.
2022 “Deliberations in Dance: Affecting Publics and the Politics of Ethnicity in Guinea’s Nascent Democracy.” African Studies Review 65(1): 166-188.
2021 “The Revolution Lost: Generational Change and Urban Youth Logics in Conakry’s Dance-Music.” In Young People and Popular Culture in Africa, edited by Paul Ugor.
University of Rochester Press, African History and Diaspora Series.
2019 “Performing Excess: Urban Ceremony and the Semiotics of Precarity in Guinea-Conakry.” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute 89(4): 718-738.
2018 “Occult Return, Grace, and Saabui: Practicing Transnational Kinship in Postsocialist Guinea.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24(2): 1-18.
2016 “Inalienable Performances, Mutable Heirlooms: Dance, Cultural Inheritance, and Political Transformation in the Republic of Guinea.” American Ethnologist 43(4): 650-662.
Book Reviews
2024 “A Life Worth Telling?” comment in a book forum on Ramon Sarro’s 2023. Inventing an African Alphabet: Writing, Art, and Kongo Culture in the DRC. Cambridge
University Press. Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory 14(3):783-785.
2018 “Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth Century Communism.” Kristen Ghodsee. American Ethnologist 45(3): 442-443.
Public Writing and Outreach
2024 “How the Evolution of Holds Changed the Way We Move.” Climbing Magazine.
2022 “Talking to Rocks Again? That’s Probably a Good Thing.” Climbing Magazine. August 2022.
2022 Podcast: Conversations in Atlantic Theory. August 2022.
FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
2022 Ann Gill Faculty Development Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity, Colorado State University
2021 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Post-PhD Research Grant
2014-15 Yale University, Dissertation Fellowship
2012-13 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
2012-13 National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
2012-13 Yale MacMillan Center, Dissertation Research Grant
2011 National Science Foundation, Research Experience for Graduates Pre-dissertation Fieldwork Grant
2007 Americorps Service Learning Grant
2006 New York City Teaching Fellowship
CONFERENCE ACTIVITY
Papers Presented
2023 “Vertical Proficiencies.” Paper on a panel called Ethnographies of Vertical and Volumetric Ecologies, presented at the Annual meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, Toronto, Canada.
2022 “What Rocks Will Tolerate: on lithic animacy among stone athletes.” Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Seattle, WA.
2021 “Semiotic Resourcefulness in Urban Guinea.” Annual meeting of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, Boulder, CO.
2021 “Embodied Evidence” in roundtable series: Big Mouth: Film, Advocacy, and Truth Claims in a Guinean Trial. Presented at the annual meeting of the AAA, virtual.
2021 Participant on roundtable, Big Mouth: Film, Advocacy, and Truth Claims in a Guinean Trial. Royal Anthropological Institute Visual Anthropology Conference.
2019 “Affecting a Non-Ethnic Public: Dance and Emerging Democracy in Urban Guinea.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Boston.
2018 “Resonance, Authority, and the Space of Dance in Urban Guinea.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, CA.
2018 “Contingencies of Authoritarianism: Affect, Expressive Culture, and State Power in Postindependence Guinea.” Paper presented at the joint annual meeting of the Am.
Ethnological Society and the Society for Visual Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA.
2017 “Immaterial Infrastructures and the ‘Affective Register’ of Cities.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.
2017 “Dance and the Semiotics of Exposure in Urban Guinea.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society, Stanford, California.
2016 “Transnational Intimacies: Migration, Capacity, and the Mutual Being of Kinship.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
Minneapolis, Minnesota.
2016 “Powerful Signs: Dance as Aspirational Practice in Conakry, Guinea” Paper presented at the East Coast Semiotic Anthropology Conference, University of Pennsylvania.
2016 “Improvising the African Urban in Postsocialist Conakry.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, California.
2015 “Mythologizing the Rural, Performing the Urban: Retrofitting the Rural/Urban Dichotomy in Contemporary Conakry.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
AAA, Denver, Colorado.
2014 “Grassroots Postsocialism: Ambivalence, Legibility, and the Privatization of Dance in Guinea, West Africa.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.
2013 “The Gift of Dundunba: Dance and Social Cohesion in Urban Guinea.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago.
2013 “Reinventing the Dundunba: Dance, Power, and Social Change in Conakry Guinea.” Paper presented at the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) and
Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) International Joint Conference, Riverside, California.
2010 “Critical Absences: Praise, Memory, and the Avoidance of Political Critique in Guinean Popular Music.” Paper presented at the Graduate Conference on Music and War,
U. Texas, Austin.
Panels, Roundtables, and Interviews Organized
2024 Organizer/ Interviewer, “Quality, Quantia, and the Nonhuman World: An Interview with Paul Kockelman,” Virtual live interview, annual meeting of the AAA, Tampa.
2024 Organizer, “Sensuous Qualities,” Roundtable, annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Tampa, Florida. November 2024.
2023 Organizer, “Affecting Encounters: Transcending the Affect-Semiotics Divide.” Roundtable at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Toronto.
2022 Organizer, “Lithic Ethnographies in the Anthropocene,” Panel at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Seattle, WA.
2021 Organizer, “Politics, Aesthetics, Performances, and the African City,” Author Meets Critic Roundtable, annual meeting of the African Studies Association, virtual.
2019 Co-organizer, “Afterlives of Nationalism in African Expressive Cultures.” Annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Boston, MA.
2018 Organizer, “Affecting the Political.” Joint conference of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for Visual Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA.
2014 Co-organizer, “Performance Between the Posts: Afro-Asian Dialogues at the Intersection of Postsocialism and Postcoloniality.” AAA, Washington, DC.
INVITED TALKS AND OTHER PRESENTATIONS
2021 Aesthetics, Politics, and Urban Youth Culture in Guinea, West Africa. Lecture, Colorado State University Musicology Club, Virtual.
2021 Book talk: Infinite Repertoire: On Dance and Urban Possibility in Postsocialist Guinea. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Virtual. https://watson.brown.edu/events/2021/adrienne-cohen-infinite-repertoire-dance-and-urban-possibility-postsocialist-guinea
2018 “Immaterial Infrastructures” Part of a public panel entitled “Innovations Out of Africa: Cities.” Africa Center for Sustainable Ecosystems and Societies Under Global Change. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO.
2015 “Mythologizing the Rural, Performing the Urban: How Guinean Dancers Fracture the Rural/Urban Dichotomy” Ethnography and Social Theory Colloquium, Yale University Department of Anthropology.
2011 Moderator, World Performance Project talkback “Engagement Fémenin: an Evening of West African Contemporary Dance” Art’ Dév/ Compagnie Auguste-Bienvenue, Yale Repertory Theatre.
2011 Commentator, Yale Colloquium on Agrarian Studies. Paper by Jocelyn Alexander “Nationalism and Self-Government in Rhodesian Detention: Gonakudzingwa, 1964-1974.”
