Katharine Ellis Coman ( – ) was an American social activist and professor. She was based at the women-only Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she created new courses in political economy, in line with her personal belief in social change. As dean, she established a new department of economics and sociology. Among other admired works, Coman wrote The Industrial History of the United States and Economic Beginnings of the Far West: How We Won the Land Beyond the Mississippi. She was the first female statistics professor in the US, the only woman co-founder of the American Economics Association, and author of the first paper published in The American Economic Review. A believer in trades unionism, social insurance and the settlement movement, Coman travelled widely to conduct her research, and took her students on field trips to factories and tenements. She shared a home with poet Katharine Lee Bates. Early life Coman was born on 23 November 1857, to Martha Ann Seymour Coman (1826–1911) and Levi Parsons Coman (1826–1889) in Newark, Ohio. Her mother had graduated from an Ohio female seminary, and her father had been educated at Hamilton College, and thus Coman received much of her early education at home. She attended the University of Michigan for two years, left college to teach in Ottawa, Illinois for two years, and then returned to university. She earned a Bachelor of Philosophy (PhB) degree in 1880, one of only a handful of women to do so. She was influenced by the work of John Stuart Mill, which is evident in her later work as economist and historian. Coman attended lectures about socialism while traveling in London. Later in her career, she was influenced by Alfred Marshall (1890), Francis Amasa Walker (1883), and social Darwinism. While at the University of Michigan, Coman studied under Professors Charles Kendall Adams of the German Historical School; James Burrill Angell, then president of the university; and Henry Carter Adams, a renowned statistician. Wellesley College After earning her PhB, she joined the faculty at Wellesley College, a newly established private college for women in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Angell recommended her for the position, noting her talent for teaching. She first taught English rhetoric, and in 1881 became an instructor in history. In 1883, she was promoted to full professor of history. Because Coman believed that economics could address social problems, she urged the Wellesley administration to offer courses on the