Deborah Valenze

Deborah M. Valenze (born 1953) is an American historian who is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor at Barnard College in New York. She has written a number of books on topics that include early British women preachers and the global history of milk.

Life
Valenze was born in Plattsburgh, New York, in 1953. A "life-long passion" for music began with violin lessons when she was eight. She attended Radcliffe College, where she majored in European history.

She gained her doctorate at Brandeis University and she taught there and at Smith College and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

In 1985 she published Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton University Press).

In 1989 she became an assistant professor at Barnard College In 1995, "The First Industrial Woman" (Oxford University Press) appeared.

Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. In 2006, her book, The Social Life of Money in the English Past was proposed as one of the best books of the year by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm. He wrote, "Deborah Valenze's extraordinarily original The Social Life of Money in the English Past (Cambridge University Press) removes the history of money from the economists and inserts it into the lives of people who cannot quite understand it but find they have to live by it. The issues it raises go well beyond 18th-century Britain." Valenze was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2011. Milk: A Local and Global History appeared that same year. A UK reviewer called the book a "fascinating history."

Her most recent book, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, was published by Yale University Press in 2023.