Deborah R. Coen, assistant professor of history, received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard and was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. She teaches courses in modern European history and the history of science and technology. Her current research, on the history of climatology and seismology, centers on the Habsburg Empire’s status as a laboratory for studies of the relationship between nature and culture. Her other research interests include the emergence of scientific concepts of “error” and the intersections between science and private life. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), which won the Susan Abrams Prize for best book in the history of science from the University of Chicago Press, the Barbara Jelavich Prize from the American Association for the advancement of Slavic Studies, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize. She is also a co-editor, with Jim Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic, of Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (2006).

Click here for Susan Abrams Prize citation

Course Offerings:
Senior Research Seminar
Europe from 1789 to the Present
History of Environmental Thinking
Bodies and Machines
Vienna and the Birth of the Modern
The Sex of Science: Gender and Knowledge in Modern History                   Central Europe: Nations, Cultures, and Ideas
Graduate Course: New Approaches to Central European History