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 five different universities on two continents and an island, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. She is most interested in topics where humans and nature meet, including subjects in early American history, intellectual history, the history of science, and environmental history. 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). She is also the editor of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition (2012). Her reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal. Professor Chaplin's most recent book is the first history of around-the-world travel, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012).
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