Professor Mathilde Cohen has been selected for a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at Princeton University for the 2020-21 academic year.

The University Center for Human Values at Princeton awards the fellowships to scholars who research and write about topics involving human values in public and private life. The program draws from a range of disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, literature, history, classics, economics and law.

Cohen has written extensively about the legal questions around human milk and placentas, and plans to focus her work at Princeton on the ambivalent status in our political, legal, and parenting culture of expressing human milk. She will examine the expanding possibilities of milk expression and how pumping milk for consumption from a cup or bottle raises a set of legal and ethical questions distinct from those raised by nursing at the breast.

The current global pandemic will likely cause Cohen and other fellows to carry out their fellowships remotely by telecommuting. Adapting to the current conditions, Cohen’s work will focus on lactation in quarantine, examining whether and how lactation has changed in this time of crisis. She is collaborating with photographic artist Corinne May Botz, to interview and take pictures via Zoom and FaceTime of women breastfeeding and pumping milk so as to make visible their lactation labor and its particular challenges in a time of lockdowns.

Cohen is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, where she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in law and philosophy. She earned her LLM and JSD as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia Law School. She joined the UConn Law faculty in 2012.