Deborah Coen

Deborah Coen's picture
Professor of History & History of Science & Medicine
Office: 
HQ Room 246. Office hours Spring '26: Thursdays 3:00-5:00
Phone number: 
+1 (203) 436-8100
Email: 
deborah.coen@yale.edu
Research Areas: 
History of the modern physical and environmental sciences; Central European intellectual and cultural history

Recent Publications

“Atmospheric Influence: History at the Nexus of Climate and Life,” Fieldsights (April 2026)

“Monsters of the Anthropocene,” LARB (February 2026)

Interview in The Times of India (August 2024)

“Reimagining Earth in the Earth System,” Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (August 2024)

“What’s Next for Histories of Climate Change?” LARB (January 2024)

“Climate” in Encyclopedia of the History of Science (December 2023)

“Placing diverse knowledge systems at the core of transformative climate research,” Ambio (May 2023)

Biography

Deborah R. Coen is a historian of science whose research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society. At Yale she is also a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

Professor Coen is the author of Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (2018), winner of the 2019 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science; The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter, which examines seismology’s history as a form of “citizen science” and was a finalist for the Turku Book Prize from the European Society for Environmental History; and Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), which won the Susan Abrams Prize from the University of Chicago Press, the Barbara Jelavich Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize.

Forthcoming in 2027 is Stewards of the Sky: The Women Who Brought Climate Change Down to Earth (University of Chicago Press).