Austen Van Burns is a historian of the physical and social sciences.
Her dissertation, “Unifying Science During the Rise of Fascism,” focuses on the Unity of Science movement, a fractious group of around 75 physicists, mathematicians, logicians, and linguistic philosophers active during the 1930s and Second World War. Under the watchful eye of the Viennese sociologist Otto Neurath, members of the movement advocated for a “scientific conception of the world” in which only verifiable knowledge could improve the human condition. Some of the unifiers became émigré scholars. Others perished in the Holocaust. By arguing that the era’s political crises did not lead to epistemic ones, the dissertation sheds new light on why the unifiers’ views dominated postwar Anglo-American philosophy, science, and politics.
Austen earned a BA with Honors in Classical Studies from Swarthmore College. After graduating, she taught English in Germany as a Fulbright grantee and then worked in the tech industry. She earned her MA in History at Princeton in the spring of 2022, passing her general examinations with distinction. From 2023–2024, she was a visiting researcher attached to the Chair for the History of Science at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is currently a Resident Graduate Student for New College West, one of Princeton’s seven undergraduate residential colleges.