Thomas Coens

Dr. Coens joined the Papers of Andrew Jackson and the University of Tennessee History Department in 2004. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in history. Awarded a Mellon Fellowship in 1998, he received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2004, writing a dissertation entitled “The Formation of the Jackson Party, 1822-1825.”

Dr. Coens is broadly interested in American political, intellectual and social history from the Revolution through the Civil War. His essay “The Jackson Political Party: A Force for Democratization?” appeared in A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). He has co-edited volumes 7 to 12 of the Papers of Andrew Jackson, covering the years 1829 to 1834. He is currently writing a monograph on nuclear fear in the 1980s.