This lecture will be live-streamed on YouTube.
Benjamin Franklin, that quintessential American character, achieved the pinnacle of his career and fame in France, far from his Boston birthplace and his adopted home of Philadelphia. His international life and times represent an intersection between natural science and political diplomacy that has rarely been achieved in history. And Franklin fit so well into the cultural life of France that traces of him linger throughout Paris.
Speaker: Joyce E. Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History
A former Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Chaplin has taught at six different universities on two continents and two islands, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. She is the author of several books, including The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), and 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, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Washington Post. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the American Philosophical Society, and overseer of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first historical society in the United States (1791).
