Jamie Cohen-Cole is Associate Professor at George Washington University and has held fellowships at the Fishbein Center for History of Science at the University of Chicago, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University. His current book project examines the cultural history of developmental psychology and its efforts to define human nature through the idea that very young children can best be understood if they are treated as practicing scientists.
His first book, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (The University of Chicago Press, 2014) examines the conjunction of the cognitive and social sciences, norms of scientific reason, and the cultural politics of post-World War II America. It was awarded an honorable mention by the Organization of American Historians for its 2015 Frederick Jackson Turner award for an author's first book on any aspect of American history. His article “The Creative American” won the 2011 article prize from the Forum for History of Human Science.