Deborah Coen, Assistant Professor of History, joined the Barnard faculty in 2006. In addition to teaching for the Department of History, Professor Coen is affiliated with Barnard's Women's Studies Program. Prior to coming to Barnard, Professor Coen was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Professor Coen has taught such courses as "Bodies and Machines, 1750-1939," "History of Environmental Thinking," "Gender and Knowledge in Modern History," "Vienna and the Birth of the Modern," and "Central Europe: Nations, Cultures, and Ideas."

Professor Coen's research centers on the history of the physical and earth sciences and the cultural history of central Europe. Her current projects include The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science, 1755-1935, and a history of imperial Austria as a laboratory for studies of the relationship between nature and culture.

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

NSF Science, Technology, and Society Grant #0848583, 2009-2011
Defining Wisdom Grant from the University of Chicago, 2008-2010
Barbara Jelavich Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 2008
Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize, 2008
Susan Abrams Book Prize from the University of Chicago Press, 2007
Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows, 2004-6

The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science, 1755-1935 (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, 2012). "Witness to Disaster: Earthquakes and Expertise in Comparative Perspective," special issue of Science in Context (March, 2012).

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Awarded the Susan Abrams Prize from the University of Chicago Press, the Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize, and the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (Science History Publications, 2006). Co-edited with James R. Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic.

“Imperial Climatographies from Tyrol to Turkestan," Osiris 26:Climate and Cultural Anxiety (2011): 45-65.

“Climate and Circulation in Imperial Austria,” Journal of Modern History 82: 4 (December, 2010): 839-875.

“The Storm Lab: Meteorology in the Nineteenth-Century Alps,” Science in Context 9 (2009): 463-486.

“Living Precisely in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” Journal of the History of Biology 39 (2006): 493-523.

“Scientists’ Errors, Nature’s Fluctuations, and the Law of Radioactive Decay, 1899-1926.” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 32:2 (2002): 179-205.