The embedded cobordism category under study in this paper generalizes the category of conformal surfaces, introduced by G. Segal in [S2] in order to formalize the concept of field theories. Our main result identifies the homotopy type of the classifying space of the embedded$d$-dimensional cobordism category for all$d$. For$d$= 2, our results lead to a new proof of the generalized Mumford conjecture, somewhat different in spirit from the original one, presented in [MW].