Degrees prior to the Anthropology PhD:

BS, Business, Policy, & Poverty—Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2012)

MA, Social & Cultural Analysis—American Studies Program, New York University (2017)

MA, Anthropology—Princeton University (2019)

Areas of Interest:

anthropology of capitalism, Science and Technology Studies (STS), digital anthropology, political anthropology, social studies of finance, American Studies, climate change, ethnography

Doctoral Research:

Max A. Cohen is a political and economic anthropologist and an STS scholar.  He studies the political economy of technology and knowledge work, mainly in present-day North America.  His dissertation, Subgoliath: Venture Capitalism and the Hunt for Baby Unicorns at the Technological “Frontier,” is a critical ethnography of the booming American tech startup economy and the high-stakes speculative investments that drive it.  Max’s 2017–22 fieldwork among venture capitalists, startup entrepreneurs, and technologists in the San Francisco Bay Area and across the U.S. addresses questions of value and veracity, autonomy and AI, power and prediction, risk and race, efficiency and sustainability.  His research has been awarded funding by the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences at Princeton University.  

Other Research and Work:

Max previously conducted and analyzed seventy-five in-depth interviews about family finance with middle-class debtors across the U.S. for Caitlin Zaloom’s Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost (Princeton UP, 2019). His research, political, and teaching interests also include social movements. Since 2011, he has organized with racial and economic justice campaigns for student debt cancellation, tenant protections, undocumented migrants’ access to citizenship, food service worker unionization, and graduate worker unionization.