A Brief Bio

Curriculum Vitae

Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has taught at six different universities on two continents, an island, a peninsula, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. She is most interested in topics where humans and nature meet, including the histories of science, technology, medicine, food, environment, climate, and biodiversity. An award-winning author, her major works include 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), and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012), and (with Alison Bashford) The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Re-reading the Principle of Population (2016). She is also the editor of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition (2012) and of Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: A Norton Critical Edition 2018). She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019), and of the American Philosophical Society (2020), and a corresponding fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (elected 2022). She received a Guggenheim Fellowship, 2018-19. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Wall Street Journal. Professor Chaplin's most recent book is The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2025).