Sarah Cohen
Sarah R. Cohen, Associate Professor of Art History, received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University in 1988. Her research focuses upon representations of the body in European art from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Her book, Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000, and an article "Rubens's France: Gender and Personification in the Marie de Médicis Cycle," appeared in the September, 2003 Art Bulletin. Recently, the focus of her research has shifted to the animal body, with a book project that addresses artistic representations of animal life and death, and the association of this animal art with eighteenth-century concerns about the relation between body and soul, both animal and human. Her first publication in this area: "Chardin's Fur: Painting, Materialism, and the Question of Animal Soul" appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies 38:1 (Fall 2004). The courses she teaches at the University at Albany address art and architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including two courses that are open to graduate students as well as undergraduates: "Women in Art" (cross-listed with Women's Studies) and a research seminar, "Art and Society in Early Modern France" (cross-listed with French Studies). Sarah Cohen also directs the Art History program and the Film Studies minor.
