Joyce E. Chaplin is James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She has taught at five different universities on two continents and an island and in a maritime studies program in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She is the author of 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), and Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (2009).