Joyce Chaplin

Who is Joyce Chaplin?

Joyce Chaplin is James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Her interests include early American history, environmental history and intellectual history.

After receiving her BA from Northwestern University and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1986, she taught at Vanderbilt University in Nashville for fourteen years. She became Professor of History at Harvard in 2000.

Among her award-winning books are An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo- American Frontier, 1500-1676, and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius. She is currently completing a book called The Whole World Round: A Natural History of Circumnavigation.

She is married to David Armitage, who is also a professor of history at Harvard.