Madeleine Cosman

Madeleine Pelner Cosman (Dec. 4, 1937 - March 2, 2006) authored many books and was a faculty member at the City College of New York beginning shortly after obtaining a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in 1964 until her retirement in 1993. Her main area of expertise was medieval and Renaissance literature, founding in 1968 the Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at City College.

In addition to her doctorate degree, Cosman received a B.A. from Barnard College in 1959, an M.A. in comparative literature from Hunter College in 1960, and a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1995.

Cosman's book Fabulous Feasts: Medieval Cookery and Ceremony (1976) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

A strong advocate of gun-ownership and anti-immigration, Cosman served on the board of the Wake Up America Foundation. In recent years, she became known for writings, lectures, and talk-radio appearances in which she expressed her views on the many alleged evils of immigration into the United States; among these was a controversial article that appeared in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons titled "Illegal Aliens and American Medicine". Her claims have been embraced by advocates of stricter limits on immigration and stricter law-enforcement of current laws.

Critics have objected that many of her controversial claims on immigration are untrustworthy due her lack of credentials. For example, a reporter on Lou Dobbs' CNN program had cited as facts Cosman's claims that there were recently, over a period of three years, 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the United States and that many of these were the result of illegal immigrants bringing the disease into the country. Dobbs has since rejected these claims as unsubstantiated, calling Cosman "a wackjob".