Dr. Coens joined the Papers of Andrew Jackson and the 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 is currently writing a short history of Andrew Jackson and Indian Removal, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Selected Publications

• “Young Hickory’s Apprenticeship: James K. Polk in the Bank War,” in James K. Polk and His Time (University of Tennessee Press, 2022). 
• Associate Editor, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume 11 (1833) (University ofTennessee Press, 2019). 
• Review of Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 115:3 (Summer 2017), pp. 424-28.