Joyce Chaplin

Biography

Historian, author, and climate activist Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, where she is an affiliate of the History of Science Department and of the Graduate School of Design. Born in California, she received her BA degree from Northwestern University and her MA and PhD from Johns Hopkins. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has taught at six universities on two continents, an island, and a peninsula, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. A prize-winning author, her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Estonian, and, forthcoming, into Turkish and Chinese. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. In 2018, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 2019 was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2020 a member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin. She serves on the advisory boards for the Massachusetts Historical Society and the John Carter Brown Library. In 2014, she was a co-founder of Harvard Faculty Divest and continues to organize and advise efforts across academia to divest from fossil fuels.