Deborah Coen to speak at the CEHIC on climate study and its connections with 19th century Vienna

Deborah Coen, Professor of History and History of Science & Medicine at Yale University is considered to be one of today's youngest and most brilliant historians of science, famous for books such as: Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (Chicago, 2007) and The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter (Chicago, 2013). Her research in history helps to rethink the key problems in today's and yesterday's scientific culture, such as uncertainty and probability, public and private science, and the role of experts and laymen in the construction of knowledge.

At the Centre for the History of Science (CEHIC), Professor Coen will offer a seminar on her latest book: Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago, 2018). In the 19th century, long before the era of computers and satellites, and as part of the political and administrative projects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, climate science studied the different scales of time and space from a multidimensional and multi-causal perspective. The researcher will present a world apparently very different from the one we know, where art, science, politics and geography were intimately related to finding a convincing explanation of the climate's behaviour in different parts of the empire. A world which nonetheless can help to understand the complexity of today's climate problems.