Joyce Chaplin

Office Hours: Wednesdays 3-5pm.

Joyce E. Chaplin, BA (Northwestern), MA (Johns Hopkins), PhD (Johns Hopkins), is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History in the Department of History at Harvard University, where she teaches the histories of science, climate, colonialism, and environment. She is also an Affiliated Faculty Member in Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, an affiliate of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a Faculty Member of Harvard’s American Studies Program, and is on the Faculty Steering Committee for the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. She serves on the Faculty Executive Board of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture and is a Trustee of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first historical society in the United States (1791). A former Fulbright Scholar to the United Kingdom, she has taught at six different institutions on two continents, an island, and a peninsula, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. Back on dry land, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and of the American Philosophical Society in 2020.

An award-winning author, Professor Chaplin’s 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), The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012), and (coauthored), The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (2016). She is the editor of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition (2012) and An Essay on the Principle of Population: A Norton Critical Edition (2017), and is a coeditor of two essay collections, Food in Time and Place (2014) and Genealogies of Genius (2016). Her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Estonian, and, forthcoming, into Chinese. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal and Aeon. Her most recent book is The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution (2025), for which she received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Find out more about what she’s been doing or thinking @joycechaplin.bsky.social