The Chronicle of Higher Education just named Dr. Daniel Cohen one of academia’s top Tech Innovators for 2012 for his innovative approaches to employing digital tools in research and teaching.  Is he a computer scientist, business professor, or cognitive psychologist?  Nope, he’s an historian of 19th century science and religion, not a typical place where you’d expect to find someone on technology’s cutting edge. Nice to turn the tables on those who believe history is just about the past and has little to offer the future.  Think again.

Dan Cohen is an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History and director of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia. He is the co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and has published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, and the future of history in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Rethinking History.  If that isn’t enough, he is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship.

To learn more about the work being done by Cohen and others at the center to preserve history through the use of digital media, read “Presenting and Preserving the Past Through Digital Media” in Mason Research and “A Digital Humanist Puts New Tools in the Hands of Scholars” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.