Deborah R. Coen is Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches the history of science and modern European history. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007) and The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (2013).
Deborah R. Coen
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Writing on Public Books
Dancing on a Crowded Planet
Thirty dancers are barely enough to fill the shadow of the life-sized blue whale that hangs, mid-dive, in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Yet on three nights in March, their seething performance succeeded in making the 29,000-square-foot room feel overpopulated. The performance was the […]
Historical Futorology
These days headlines often read like plot points in an apocalyptic science-fiction story: Fossil fuel use has reengineered the earth’s atmosphere and acidified the oceans. Polar ice sheets are melting. Coastal cities are flooding. The planet has entered the epoch of the sixth mass extinction. Scanning the outline of this drama over your morning coffee, […]
