Elise Martel Cohen

Elise Martel Cohen teaches in the Sociology Department at Loyola University Chicago, U.S.A. Her areas of research and publication include the sociology of religion, identity, work and occupations, and economic sociology.

Most recently Elise penned an Op-Ed in The Washington Post about Afghan workers who were formerly employed under a US Dept of Defense program that folded. She is currently working on a book that, inspired by her father, applies the sociological imagination to the trajectories of minorities in Istanbul, Turkey. While her published research to date has drawn upon participant observation and ethnography—she’s worked alongside street vendors, scrap metal collectors, and spent several years waitressing at a biker bar for her paper “From Mensch to Macho: The Social Construction of a Jewish Masculinity”—Dr. Martel Cohen is also a skilled statistician and mixed-methodologist: she teaches statistics, burrows in the Ottoman Bank Archives, and serves as researcher for her faculty union. With varied interests, her work is oriented toward the investigation of social, symbolic, and economic logics of social life.

Since October 7 Elise has not written anything , experiencing a profound sense of dislocation in the spaces she used to call home (the academy, the discipline of sociology, her faculty union, her social circles). Elise is grateful for the Centre and to have a place where she can develop her work examining the ways sociology can help us make sense of contemporary strains of antisemitism.