Selma Jeanne Cohen International Encyclopedia of Dance records

1964-1995

Selma Jeanne Cohen was born in Chicago, IL in 1920. She received an A.A. degree from Stephens College and an A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. (in English) from the University of Chicago. In the late 1940s, after earning her doctorate in English Literature, and took her first teaching assignment at University of California at Los Angeles. She remained a teacher and lecturer throughout the 1950s and began publishing articles on the history of dance and theater in scholarly journals. Cohen co-founded the Dance Perspectives quarterly journal in 1959. One of the first journals dedicated to international dance history, Dance Perspectives became a respected publication with Cohen as its editor from 1966-1976. Cohen spent much of the 1960s teaching at the Connecticut College Dance Department, eventually becoming Founder-Director of the Connecticut College American Dance Festival Critics' Conferences in 1970-1972. Cohen held positions at Smith College and lectured for the Five College, Incorporated. In the 1970’s, Cohen held graduate seminars at Sarah Lawrence College and University of Chicago on dance history. She was Founder-Director of the University of Chicago Seminars in Dance History (1974-1976), a three-week course which was the first intensive seminar on dance history.

The International Encyclopedia of Dance (IED) began as a project of the Dance Critics Association intended to address the need for a comprehensive scholarly encyclopedia for the field of dance. The first National Endowment of the Arts (NEH) grant in support of the encyclopedia was awarded to the Dance Perspectives Foundation, Inc. in 1976 to help fund a planning conference of leading dance scholars. The scholars in attendance at this meeting would help set up the structure and content of the proposed encyclopedia. The IED was planned to be a multivolume work with an international scope covering all forms of dance in all countries of the world. After being awarded a second grant, the Dance Perspectives Foundation undertook full sponsorship of the IED in 1977 and formed an editorial board that could help realize the publication. As the project grew, the editorial board found it necessary to expand the number of commissioned articles to adequately meet its objective of worldwide coverage. Due to difficulties of communication between the editorial board and international consultants, the encyclopedia’s publication date was delayed over the course of the 1980s. The project passed from Charles Scribner’s Sons to Macmillan Publishing and was delayed by publication cost issues, and the lack of editorial knowledge on behalf of the publishers’ copyeditors. Since much of the material written for the IED was original, it proved difficult for the publishers to fact check the articles, some of which were not written in English. Sadly, parts of the IED manuscript and editorial correspondence were lost during the physical transition from Scribner’s to Macmillan. The University of California Press agreed to take on the project in 1988, a relationship that would last until 1993 when budget cuts in the California university system forced the publisher to abandon the project. Ultimately, the IED achieved realization when the Oxford University Press agreed to edit, restore and expand the manuscript in 1994. Manuscripts were retyped, dance scholars were allowed to act as editorial consultants, and to develop a rigorous style scheme and format. Two thousand illustrations and three hundred new articles were commissioned. The IED was published as a six volume large format set in 1998.