The Cohen-Porter Fund

The Cohen-Porter Fund for the Department of English promotes the fields of English and American literature by providing funds for research, student grants, and books and materials for the department. It facilitates research by sponsoring international conferences, symposia, and guest lectureships, and by travel grants to graduate students and junior faculty at advanced stages of their research to attend conferences and to consult libraries and archives.

The Cohen-Porter Fund is dedicated to facilitating international links between the Tel Aviv University Department of English and American Studies and universities and scholars abroad.  Cohen-Porter Visiting Lecturers have included Charles Altieri, Gillian Beer, James Chandler, Jonathan Dollimore, Frances Ferguson, Leslie Fiedler, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Geoffrey Hartman, Terence Hawkes, Jerome McGann, Susan Gubar, Walter Benn Michaels, J. Hillis Miller, Lee Mitchell, Annabelle Patterson, Marjorie Perloff, Werner Sollors, Marianna Torgovnick, Herbert Tucker, and Helen Vendler.

The Cohen-Porter Fund has provided partial sponsorship for conferences on diverse topics, including "Autobiography, Confession, and Testimony," "Knowledge, Science, and Power," "Avant-Garde Poetry," "English Writing in Israel," "Privacy: The History of an Idea," "Jewish America-350 Years," "Cultural Pilgrimages: Beyond Multiculturalism?," "Psychoanalysis and Literature," and "Interpretation in Psychoanlysis and in the Humanities.", and “Poetry Now” – an annual international conference on poetics and contemporary English poetry.