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Joyce E. Chaplin

James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History

Robinson Hall, Room 122, 35 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Joyce E. Chaplin
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  • 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). 

Twitter

  • JoyceChaplin1
    JoyceChaplin1 Fascinating and fantastic to hear about the renovation plan to make @JCBLibrary more welcoming and physically accessible, including new landscaping with native plants.
    12 hours 28 sec ago.
  • JoyceChaplin1
    JoyceChaplin1 Today was our final department meeting of 2021-22 and it had three wonderful elements: it was productive, it was moving, and it’s OVER.
    2 days 11 hours ago.
  • JoyceChaplin1
    JoyceChaplin1 Really appreciating that @TheWilmaTheater‘s land acknowledgment for its knockout “Cherry Orchard” isn’t just a rote recitation but connected to the politics of the play, to make the audience actually think about it. t.co/O7pP36LvJA
    3 days 9 hours ago.
  • JoyceChaplin1
    JoyceChaplin1 My only hot take about teaching this year is that some students seem to have acquired maturity well beyond their years at this stage of the #pandemic while others seem developmentally challenged for their age—and I’m as worried about the former as the latter.
    6 days 12 hours ago.
  • JoyceChaplin1
    JoyceChaplin1 “Face to Face: Portraits of People of Color before Photography” @HoughtonLib raises fantastic questions about who “gets” a portrait, why, and where do their portraits end up being archived? t.co/Hs9qTbuEvP
    1 week 12 hours ago.
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Recent Publications

  • Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit
  • “Planetary Power?: The United States and the History of around-the-World Travel,”
  • “Earthsickness: Circumnavigation and the Terrestrial Human Body, 1520-1800,”
  • "How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History"
  • "The Pacific before Empire"
  • "Ogres and Omnivores: Early American Historians and Climate History"
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