Dr. Mark Cohen Named Distinguished Professor

This academic rank is the highest honor that SUNY can bestow. Cohen is the first faculty member at the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh to achieve this rank. He formerly held the rank of SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Anthropology.

"Mark Cohen is the model of the scholar/teacher, teacher/scholar," said Dr. John Clark, interim president of Plattsburgh State. "While his research and scholarship are truly landmark and groundbreaking, he is also an exceptionally gifted and highly effective teacher who mentors and challenges students to strive for excellence."

The rank of Distinguished Professor recognizes a SUNY faculty member's national and international prominence as an exceptional scholar through a significant contribution to the research literature.

It also recognizes faculty who have raised the standards of scholarship and that the scholarly activity is of such high caliber that scholars and students elsewhere in SUNY would benefit from their presence.

Cohen, a member of the Plattsburgh State faculty since 1971, has gained numerous honors and recognition for his scholarship, teaching and service to the campus.

He is one of Plattsburgh's only two Guggenheim Fellows, during which time he served as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University. A former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, he held a Fulbright Lectureship while serving as a visiting professor at Hebrew University. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Sydney.

Cohen is a recipient of the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship.

He also holds the Phi Eta Sigma Outstanding Professor Teaching Award and is the author of five books including the award-winning Culture of Intolerance .

"I am extraordinarily proud of this promotion because it is a very rare award that represents the significance and quality of contributions I have made to large-scale theory in anthropology at an international level," said Cohen. "The honor recognizes a significant role that I have played in successfully challenging the prevailing 'progress' model of cultural evolution that we consider 'common knowledge.'"

Many of his recent articles were by invitation to conferences. The most recent of these papers were presented at a conference in St. Petersburgh, Russia.

His work has been discussed in Newsweek , Discover Magazine , U.S. News and World Report , Science , and Scientific American .

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