About
Amy R. Cohen is a scholar, teacher, artist, and organizer.
She is Professor of Classics and of Theatre at Randolph College. She is also Director of the Center for Ancient Drama and holds the William Erness Thoresen and Catherine Ehrman Thoresen ’23 Chair of Speech and Theatre.
She grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and went to Harrisonburg High School. She received a B.A. in Classics (Greek) at Yale University, and then a Ph.D. in Classics, with a minor in Comparative Literature, at Stanford University.
At Randolph College, she and her students have put that work on its feet by continuing the College’s Greek Play tradition, begun in 1909 by Professor Mabel K. Whiteside. Directing the plays provides insight into the realities facing the ancient playwrights, and her research continues to argue that you cannot understand the plays without understanding how they were played. She has directed eleven original-practices productions in the Whiteside Greek Theatre, one in Greece to celebrate the centennial of the first Miss Mabel play, and one Zoom production during the pandemic of 2020.
Dr. Cohen served for six years as the editor of the journal Didaskalia, the Journal for Ancient Performance, and she has hosted five conferences on Ancient Drama in Performance. She was awarded the 2015 Society for Classical Studies Outreach Prize.
Her work focuses on what Greek dramatic masks mean for our understanding of ancient theatre and on the interpretive implications of doubling and the three-actor convention in Greek tragedy. She’s working on a book for Johns Hopkins, When Frogs Sang on Stage: Greek Plays and the Invention of the Dramatic Imagination. She is also co-editor of the 2019 book Shakespeare in the Light: Essays in Honor of Ralph Alan Cohen, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Although Greek drama is her specialty, she loves teaching any course that leads students into an understanding of ancient literature and culture, in translation or in the original language. She’s also developing high-quality online ancient Greek pedagogy.
Her husband, Chris Cohen, teaches in the art department, and they have three children, only two of whom Dr. Cohen has pressed into service in a Greek Play.
