Stanley Cohen : Folk Devils and Moral Panics

Stanley Cohen FBA (23 February 1942 – 7 January 2013) was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.

Cohen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1942. He grew up in South Africa and was an undergraduate at the University of Witwatersrand, studying Sociology and Social Work. He came to London in 1963, where he worked as a social worker, before completing his Ph.D at LSE. From 1967, he lectured at the University of Durham and in 1972 became Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of Essex. In 1980, he moved with his family to Israel, where he was Director of the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also worked with human rights organisations dealing with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. He returned to England in 1996 and was appointed Martin White Professor of Sociology at LSE. In 1998 Cohen was elected a fellow of the British Academy, and received honorary doctorates from University of Essex in 2003 and Middlesex University in 2008. In 2009 he was the first recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the British Society of Criminology.