Barbara Alpern Engel was born in New York City on 28 June 1943 and graduated from Valley Stream Central High School in 1961.
Enrolled in the City College of New York (CUNY), she was one of five women accepted into Princeton University's Cooperative Program in Critical Languages in 1963–64, the first female undergraduates there.
After graduation, she worked for two years as a bilingual secretary and part-time translator for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but felt frustrated as women were not getting promoted there despite possessing the same credentials.
Engel was the director of the Central and East European Studies Program from 1993 to 1995 and has also served as the chair of the Department of History.
'Her perceptive and sensitive use of disparate sources,’’ writes a reviewer, ‘‘including comparative works on women in Europe and fascinating archival evidence for the experiences of individual female peasants, is particularly noteworthy.'