November 2025: Dr. Elizabeth Cohen (CAS)
Dr. Elizabeth F. Cohen is the Maxwell Professor of United States Citizenship in the Department of Political Science and Associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science. She received a BA from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. from Yale University. She has been a visiting scholar at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, Russell Sage Foundation and the Wagner School of Public Service, New York University. Cohen is the author of four books, the most recent of which is entitled Illegal: How America’s Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2020). Her scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in venues such as Ethics in International Affairs, Citizenship Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, Ethics, and the Duke Journal of Constitutional Law and Public Policy. In addition to her scholarly writing, Cohen has also published op-eds in newspapers such as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico and El Pais.
The friends you make in graduate school, either in your own program or in the field more generally, will make more difference to your career than any single senior mentor, no matter how influential that person is.
Justice in an Unjust World. Nothing gets a good discussion going like reading and critiquing different theories of what it means to be just. BU students are very incisive readers and critics.
When I was in my first year on the tenure track I won a refrigerator in a recipe contest conducted by Bon Appetit and Gourmet Magazine. At the time I was teaching at the Maxwell School (Syracuse University) and the high levels of participation in the voting process among my colleagues was a huge morale boost at a tough time in the career ladder.