Benjamin Cohen

Benjamin B. Cohen is a Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a scholar of South Asia with a particular interest in the early-modern and modern periods of the subcontinent’s history. 

His first monograph explored a discrete set of Hindu kings in India’s largest princely state, Hyderabad. (Kingship and Colonialism in India’s Deccan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). His second book broke new ground with a pan-South Asia exploration of civil society explored through the lens of social clubs (In the Club: Associational Life in Colonial India, Manchester University Press, 2015, Studies in Imperialism). He returned to the Deccan in his third monograph that uncovered a late nineteenth-century sex scandal (An Appeal to the Ladies of Hyderabad: Scandal in the Raj, Harvard University Press, 2019). He has also published (2019, with Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad) an edited collection of family papers from the Wanaparthy samasthan. Cohen’s fourth monograph, inspired by an Air Deccan flight from Hyderabad to New Delhi, is Water in Hyderabad and the Deccan: A History of Power and Elites from the 11th to 20th Centuries. (Oxford University Press, October 2026.) 

Trained in the languages of the Deccan, Cohen has worked in Telugu, Urdu, and Hindi. Before joining the academy, Cohen was a singer-songwriter, barista, and nightclub manager—but not all at the same time.

TEACHING:

Regular courses:

• Modern India Medieval India Ancient India
• The Mughal Empire
• Environmental History of India
• The Global Indian Ocean 
• Asian History to 1500
• Asian History 1500 to the present Senior Seminar (“Events in History”)

Occasional courses:

• South Asia: Conflict in Historical Perspective The Indian Diaspora
• Mughals to Modernity: A Learning Abroad Course