Joyce Chaplin

Joyce E. Chaplin (BA, Northwestern; MA and PhD, Johns Hopkins) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University and director of Harvard’s program in American Studies. She was a Fulbright Scholar in the United Kingdom during the 1985-86 academic year, when she was also a visiting student at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. She has taught at six different universities on two continents, a peninsula, and an island, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean.

A specialist in early American history, intellectual history, environmental history, and the history of science, Professor Chaplin is the author of An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (1993), Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (2001), The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize and winner of the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012), and (with Alison Bashford) The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (2016). She is also the editor of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition (2012) and (with Darrin McMahon) of Genealogies of Genius (2015). Her reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal.