Noah Cohan's research and teaching are oriented to the intersection of American sports, fan cultures, power, and inequality, particularly with regard to race and gender.
Cohan's writing has appeared in Slate, the Conversation, Public Books, and the Common Reader, among other platforms, and his expertise has been featured in interviews with The New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis On the Air, Bleacher Report, and KCBS Radio.
Cohan’s recent course offerings include "Empire of Hoop: Basketball as American Culture," “The Racialized Sporting Landscape of St. Louis: Athletics Aesthetics, Bias, and Opportunity,” “Sports & Society: Contemporary Issues in American Sports,” and “The Black Athlete in American Literature: From Frederick Douglass to LeBron James." Cohan’s book, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sports, was published in July 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Cohan is currently at work on a cultural history of the football helmet. He has presented helmet research at multiple conferences, as well as via invitation to the University of Iowa and Notre Dame.
He is also the co-editor of Sport in the University, a special issue of the journal American Studies (Fall 2016), founding coordinator of the Sports Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, co-convener of the AMCS program initiative in Sports and Society: Culture, Power, and Identity, and co-creator of Whereas Hoops, a multimedia work of scholarship and activism that successfully advocated for the installation of basketball hoops in St. Louis's Forest Park.
