Photograph by Annabel Hine Otts
Andrew Wender Cohen is Professor of History at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. His research into the history of crime tries to uncover the lives of ordinary Americans and their experiences with the law.
He has written three books. His most recent is Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, 2026), which uses the life of Louis Bieral, a boxer, pimp and assassin turned Civil War hero, to understand everyday brutality and the rule of law in the United States. In 2015, W.W. Norton & Co. published his book, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century, which explored illicit trade, tariff enforcement and economic nationalism in the nineteenth century. His first monograph, The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, 2004), focused on economic violence and the origins of racketeering law. His current research project, “Anthony Comstock’s Gilded Age,” examines the role of the criminal law in regulating sex and gender in the post-Civil War era.
Cohen has won Syracuse’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize, as well as fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, among others. He co-edits a book series on “American Business, Politics, and Society” with the University of Pennsylvania Press and sits on the editorial boards of Reviews in American History and Law and History Review. He has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Cohen lives with his wife, daughter, two dogs, and a cat in Central New York.