Selma Jeanne Cohen

Selma Jeanne Cohen was a dance historian, critic, editor, and educator who helped establish dance history as a rigorous academic field. Born in Chicago on September 18, 1920, Cohen earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1941, a master's in 1942, and a doctorate in English in 1946, with her dissertation on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her early training in ballet with Edna McRae, followed by study with Martha Graham and José Limón, gave her scholarship a practitioner-informed foundation without diverting her toward performance as a primary career.

After teaching English at the University of California, Los Angeles, Cohen worked at Eugene Loring's American School of Dance in Hollywood from 1948 to 1953. She then moved to New York, where she taught dance history, wrote for dance periodicals, served as New York correspondent for Britain's *Dancing Times* from 1953 to 1965, and assisted *New York Times* dance critic John Martin from 1955 to 1958. In these roles she joined close observation of performance with sustained historical reading and editorial practice.

In 1959, Cohen and A. J. Pischl co-founded *Dance Perspectives*, a quarterly devoted to substantial monographs rather than brief reviews. Cohen became sole editor in 1966 and continued until the journal closed in 1976. Its focused issues gave scholars space to treat choreography, artists, genres, and historical sources at a depth unusual in dance publishing at the time. Beginning in 1962, Cohen taught dance history and writing at the American Dance Festival, and she later held appointments at the University of Chicago, the Five College Consortium, Smith College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Riverside. Through classrooms, criticism, and professional organizations, she argued that dance deserved the documentary care and analytical seriousness routinely accorded literature, music, and visual art.

Cohen's largest editorial undertaking was the *International Encyclopedia of Dance*. Developed over more than two decades and published by Oxford University Press in 1998, the six-volume reference work assembled specialist contributions across theatrical, social, ritual, and global dance traditions. Cohen served as its founding editor, coordinating an international network of contributors, advisers, and editors whose work gave the encyclopedia its authority.

Her professional recognition included a University of Chicago award for professional achievement in 1974, a Fulbright exchange in the Soviet Union in 1976, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, and the 1981 *Dance Magazine* Award—the first time that honor went to a dance historian. She was a founding member of the Society of Dance History Scholars in 1978. Cohen died in New York City on December 23, 2005. Awards and lectures bearing her name continue to support dance scholarship, extending her insistence that historical research is part of dance's living infrastructure.