Norman Cohn
| Norman Cohn | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Norman Rufus Colin Cohn 25 January 1915 London, England |
| Died | 31 July 2007 (aged 92) Cambridge, England |
| Occupation | Historian, academic, writer |
Norman Rufus Colin Cohn FBA (12 January 1915 – 31 July 2007) was a British academic, historian and writer who spent 14 years as a professorial fellow and as Astor-Wolfson Professor at the University of Sussex.
Cohn was born in London, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was educated at Gresham's School and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a scholar and research student at Christ Church between 1933 and 1939, taking a first-class degree in Modern Languages in 1936. He served for six years in the British Army, being commissioned into the Queen's Royal Regiment in 1939 and transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1944, where his knowledge of modern languages found employment. In 1941 he married Vera Broido, with whom he had a son, the writer Nik Cohn. In the immediate post-war period, he was stationed in Vienna, ostensibly to interrogate Nazis, but he also encountered many refugees from Stalinism, and the similarities in persecutorial obsessions evinced both by Nazism and Stalinism fueled his interest in the historical background for these ideologically opposed, yet functionally similar movements. After his discharge, he taught successively in universities in Scotland, Ireland, England, the United States and Canada.
In 1962, Cohn was approached by Observer editor David Astor after Astor gave a speech on the psychopathological roots of extremism. Cohn became the head of the Columbus Centre, which was set up and initially financed by Astor to look into the causes of extremism and persecution. In 1966, the Columbus Centre was formally set up as a research project at the University of Sussex and Cohn was appointed a Professorial Fellow. From 1973 to 1980, Cohn was Astor-Wolfson Professor at Sussex.
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