Professor Stanley Cohen

Department: Department of Sociology; Mannheim Centre for Criminology
Contact details: +44 (0)20 7955 7576; s.cohen@lse.ac.uk
LSE Experts: Professor Stanley Cohen

Stanley Cohen grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and was an undergraduate sociology student at the University of Witwatersrand. He left in 1963 for London where he completed his doctorate at the London School of Economics. He lectured in sociology at the University of Durham and then the University of Essex, where he was Professor of Sociology from 1974.

In 1980, Cohen and his family left Britain to live in Israel. He was Director of the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and also became active in human rights work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He returned to LSE as a visiting centennial professor in 1994 and in 1996 was appointed Martin White Professor of Sociology. He has received the Sellin-Glueck award from the American Society of Criminology and in 1998 was elected as a fellow of the British Academy. He helped set up the new LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights and now runs its teaching programme. He is also on the Board of the (Geneva-based) International Council on Human Rights Policy.

Stan Cohen has written about criminological theory, prisons, social control, criminal justice policy, juvenile delinquency, mass media, political crime and human rights violations. His books include: 

• Images of Deviance (1971); 
• Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the making of the mods and rockers (1972); 
• Psychological Survival: the experience of long-term imprisonment (with Laurie Taylor) 1973; 
• Escape Attempts (with Laurie Taylor), 1977; 
• The Manufacture of News (with Jock Young) 1977; 
• Social Control and the State (with Andrew Scull) 1983; and
• Visions of Social Control (1985); and Against Criminology (1988).

His most recent book, States of Denial: knowing about atrocities and suffering (Polity Press, 2001), deals with personal and political reactions to information, images and appeals about inhumanities, cruelty and social suffering. States of Denial was chosen as Outstanding Publication of 2001 by the International Division of the American Society of Criminology and was awarded the 2002 British Academy Book Prize.

The 30th anniversary edition of Cohen's classic Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Routledge, 2002) has just been published. In the introduction, he reviews the uses of the concept of 'moral panics' in the 30 years since 1972.

Cohen's teaching and research interests now fall in the emerging field of 'political criminology': the interface between crime, politics and human rights.

Current research

1. Together with Dr Bruna Seu (Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College): follow-up research (from States of Denial) on moral boundaries and the psychology of everyday denial
   
   
2. Two allied projects:
   
   
   1. The role of truth commissions and international criminal tribunals in creating consensual memory
      
      
   2. Problems in using the criminal law model for the control of mass atrocities
      
      
3. Supervising comparative research project (for the International Council on Human Rights Policy) on the human rights implication of 'Crime and Public Insecurity in Post-Transitional Societies'.

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