Jayita Sarkar Writes Tribute for Steve Cohen (1936-2019)
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published an obituary of South Asia scholar Stephen P. Cohen (1936-2019), published on march 20, 2020, in Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (AHA).
Sarkar writes that Steve Cohen, long associated with the Brookings Institutions and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was “the doyen of South Asian security studies” whose “towering influence remains indelible.”
More from the obituary, which can be read in full here:
Through his work and his life, Steve endeavored to build bridges between two adversarial countries—India and Pakistan—that are intrinsically more similar than different. He did so very often with humor and food. His weekly “Adda” lunch on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC, with current and former research assistants and those just passing through (including myself), was one of the many ways in which he drew people together. Upon asking him once to chair a conference panel at the last minute, I got back a humorous and good-natured response. Anyone else of his stature would have summarily refused such a request. Not Steve—he said, “Sure, happy to do it. I’m also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.” That was Steve Cohen: magnanimous, jovial, and exceedingly generous.
Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, where she is also the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She teaches diplomatic and political history at graduate and undergraduate levels. Professor Sarkar’s areas of research expertise are 20th century South Asia, history of U.S. foreign relations, politics of nuclear technologies, and connected partitions. Her book, Ploughshares & Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, (Forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the first forty years of India’s nuclear program through the prisms of geopolitics and technopolitics. Read more about Professor Sarkar on her faculty profile.