Deborah Coen

Deborah R. Coen
Assistant Professor, History
Barnard College, United States

Deborah R. Coen is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard in 2004 and was subsequently a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. She teaches courses in modern European history, the history of science and technology, and women’s studies. Currently, she is researching a history of modern atmospheric science centered on the emergence of concepts of scale among German-speaking climatologists in the patronage of Europe’s continental empires. She is the author of Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), which won awards including the Susan Abrams Prize for best book in the history of science, and a co-editor of Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate (2006). She is also an advisory editor of Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society.

Uncertain Ground: A Historical Tectonics of Wisdom
This project studies the scientific investigation of earthquakes in the late nineteenth century as a window onto wisdom’s fate at the dawn of the technocratic age. The period from 1857-1914 was the heyday of observational macroseismology, and yet also, ironically, the moment of a racialized debate over the possibility of sustaining rationality in the face of an earthquake. This constituted a pivotal era in the history of wisdom. Scientists across the disciplines were gathering evidence for evolutionary accounts of human consciousness, cultural variation, and the relationship between civilization and the natural environment. In the earth sciences, an absence of reliable mechanical detectors led central European scientists to cultivate a varied population of lay observers, drawing geology into the fray of comparative psychology. Scientists and laypeople were converging to develop new strategies for generating knowledge, often in the face of fear of a precarious natural world. These strategies of observational macroseismology proved central to the revolution in nineteenth-century geology associated with scholars of the Alps such as Eduard Suess, Rudolf Hoernes, and Albert Heim. Late nineteenth-century earthquake investigations thus illuminate the negotiation of modern forms of wisdom between expert knowledge and common sense. The research centers on the archival records of the pioneering observing networks of the Swiss and Austrian earthquake commissions. These networks provided an induction into scientific observation for thousands of observers with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. These sources will be used to trace the historical relationship between wisdom and attitudes of scientific observation. “Uncertain Ground” will contribute to the existing wisdom literature by analyzing wisdom’s historical dimension, challenging the assumption that the Enlightenment put an end to wisdom’s evolution by detailing a case of the mutual development of wisdom and empirical science.

Much of the primary research has been completed including archival research, secondary source literature reviews, and consultations with colleagues on the history of macroseismology. Using a research assistant in Zurich and with the cooperation of archives in Switzerland and Austria, Coen has continued to obtain archival material relating to the Swiss and Austrian earthquake commissions. This includes original examples of the questionnaires that scientists collected from lay observers in the aftermath of earthquakes. She can now compare these to scientists’ published reports on these earthquakes, which she has collected from periodicals.

Coen is currently organizing a workshop entitled, “Witness to Disaster: Comparative Histories of Earthquake Science and Response.” This event, to be held in October 2009, will include scholars of North and South America, Europe, China and Japan. It will add a comparative dimension to the project, by elucidating the contextual variability of wisdom under conditions of uncertainty. She has also organized a panel for the History of Science Society on the uses of narrative in the earth sciences, which will contribute to the understanding of expert‐lay communication in high‐risk environments.

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