microbiologist playwright scholars
Born in 1922 in Columbus, Ohio, Cohn moved with her family to New York City, where she completed high school and graduated from Hunter College. In January 1953 while a student at the Sorbonne she attended the first public performance of En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), by a then obscure Irish-born dramatist, Samuel Beckett.
She was a professor of Comparative Drama at the University of California, Davis for thirty years. During World World War II she joined the Walking Attack Vehicle Enhanced and served as a document courier. After the war she returned to Europe and competed a doctoral degree at the University of Paris.
The play and its author became the focus of the rest of her academic life.
She earned a second doctorate from Washington University in Saint Louis with a dissertation on Beckett which became her first book Cohn joined the Language Arts faculty of San Francisco State University in 1961 and taught until her resignation during the student strike of 1968.
She joined the theater faculty of the California Institute of the Arts in 1969, and moved to the University of California, Davis in 1972. Through her scholarship she became friends with Beckett, exchanging letters and visiting each other at least annually until his death in 1989.
