Max Cohen

Max A. Cohen is a political and economic anthropologist and Science, Technology, and Society (STS) scholar. He studies the business, culture, and politics of technology and knowledge work in present-day North America. His dissertation and first book project, “Subgoliath: Venture Capitalism and the Hunt for Baby Unicorns at the Technological ‘Frontier’,” is a critical ethnography of the tech startup economy and the high-stakes speculative investments that drive it. As the Visiting Graduate Research Fellow at the Center for Economy and Society this year, he is teaching an “AI & Society” undergraduate course at Johns Hopkins and will complete his PhD in Anthropology at Princeton in 2026.

Cohen previously conducted extensive, in-depth interviews about student debt and family finance with middle-class families across the U.S. for NYU anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom’s book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost (Princeton University Press, 2019). He holds an MA in Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University’s American Studies Program as well as a BS in Business, Policy, and Poverty from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Social movements are core to Cohen’s political, research, and teaching interests. From 2011–2024, he organized with racial and economic justice campaigns for tenant protections against slumlords (with the Crown Heights Tenant Union), consumer/student debt cancellation (with Strike Debt), undocumented migrants’ access to U.S. citizenship (with the Center for Popular Democracy), food service worker unionization (with the Penn Student Labor Action Project), and graduate worker unionization (with Princeton Graduate Students United).