Derek Cohen, Professor Emeritus of the English Department, in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, passed away peacefully on October 11, 2024.
Cohen, a beloved member of the English Department, came to York University in 1968 and taught Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama until his retirement in 2008. He was revered by his students and colleagues for his wit, sharp intellect and compassion and for opening new realms of understanding in his classrooms. Former student, Eva Brandt, said “I met Professor Cohen in my second year of university and after meeting him, I made sure to take every course that he taught in the English department. His appreciation and enthusiasm for 17th and 18th century literature was palpable in his classrooms. His wry sense of humour always kept his students laughing during class and made learning fun.”
Cohen cultivated a passion for literature, namely Shakespeare, in his classrooms, which he passed on to his many students, and was often heard quoting excerpts from various plays, then following up with a lesson on context. He was a wise, charismatic and supportive mentor to graduate students and a source of warm counsel for younger faculty members. Cohen is remembered for his positive influence on those who has the pleasure of knowing him.
His published works brought intense and innovative close readings of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays into conversation with his lifelong political and ethical concerns and commitments, including: Shakespearean Motives (1988); The Politics of Shakespeare (1993); Shakespeare’s Culture of Violence (1993); and Searching Shakespeare: Studies in Culture and Authority (2003). Hi also published a volume of essays, Jewish Presences in English Literature (1990), co-edited with his York colleague, Deborah Heller.
Before joining the University, Cohen was actively involved in anti-apartheid work, specifically as a member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM). Cohen’s his heartfelt and stalwart political commitments continued during his time at York, which came out passionately in times of crisis.
From Steven Hayward, Author, Professor and Director, Journalism Institute, Colorado College:
"I met Derek Cohen in the fall of 1995 when I enrolled in his Shakespeare graduate seminar and knew right away that I wanted to study with him. He was brilliant and generous and hilarious, a man with a storied past and an accent to match. About a decade and a half later, after he had retired, after I’d got a job in Cleveland, I asked him to come to teach a semester as a sabbatical replacement. At one point he was driving back from Toronto and got caught in an ice storm outside Erie, Pennsylvania, and his car slid off the highway. He was surprised to find that he was fine, and more surprised when, almost immediately, some guy with a truck appeared and pulled him back onto the road. The car started up and he drove it home as if nothing had happened. ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he said, and it has been ever since. I think the lesson is, keep going. Derek knew how to do that.
It was also during that time in Cleveland that my office phone rang and I found myself speaking to his sister who had a completely different accent than him. When I inquired as to how this was possible, his explanation was something like, ‘My accent is a fiction.’ As to how one acquires a fictional accent, it’s one of those things in heaven and earth of which even the philosophy of Horatio doesn’t dream. Suffice it to say that things had transpired: there had been an anti-Apartheid action in South Africa to which he’d been connected, he’d fled from South Africa to London and from there to New York and, eventually, to York U. His accent was never the same after that. As to the how and why of it, they’re lost in what Prospero called the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ What I do remember is him telling me about the arrest of Ruth First, the South African activist when he was a boy, the story of him pushing food into her through the tiny gap at the top of jailhouse window and his mother walking through the streets with Ruth First and that caption under the photo in the paper the next day read, ‘Ruth First and her mother.’ That’s who he was, a lifelong and fearless enemy of racism, the same scholar that told us to make no mistake, Merchant is an anti-Semitic play, and ambiguity is no alibi. But these things are in the books, his books, which speak for themselves and will continue to do so.
What else? He was a great mentor and friend. He called cheap wine ‘plonk’ and drank it anyway, and laughed, and when things went sideways, he said they were ‘banjaxed’--a word, he claimed, that was without origin or fixed meaning. In the years that followed I didn’t keep in touch as much as I should have but I thought of him every time I stood in front of a class. There was no one who I laughed with more, who taught me more, who believed in me more unconditionally.
The last time I saw him he was fully in the grip of Parkinson’s and it was shaking him fiercely. ‘I’m still in here,’ he told me, and that’s how I think we should remember him, as there for myself and for all of his students over the decades at York, to whom he did, and meant, more than we can say.”
Cohen will be deeply missed by a host of family, friends and colleagues.
A graveside service was held on Tuesday, October 15, 2024, in the Lagover Society section of Lambton Cemetery. Memorial donations may be made to Parkinson Canada ( 416-227-9700 or www.parkinson.ca).