Jessica Riskin

Riskin is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, of Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (2012). She is also the author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society.
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“Letter from Paris.” In Raritan, Volume 42, Number 1, Summer 2022, pp. 98-127.
"The Adventures of Mr. Machine, With Morals," in A Cultural History of the Human Body, Vol. 4: A History of the Human Body in the Age of Enlightenment, 1650-1800, ed. Carole Reeves (Oxford: Berg, 2010): Ch 4, pp. 73-92.
"Machines in the Garden." Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 2 (April 3, 2010). A second version appears in Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, eds., Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012): Ch. 11.
"Amusing Physics." In Joyce E. Chaplin, ed., Harvard Library Bulletin 2007, special catalog issue on Benjamin Franklin. [Reprinted in Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, ed., Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (Ashgate, forthcoming 2007).]
"The Defecating Duck, Or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life." in Critical Inquiry Summer 2003, Vol. 20, no. 4, 599-633. [Reprinted in Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 99-133].
"The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod." In Science in Context, 12, 1 (1999): 61-99. [Reprinted in Susan Silbey, ed., Law and Science Volume I: Epistemological, Evidentiary, and Relational Engagements (Ashgate, forthcoming 2008).]
"Poor Richard's Leyden Jar: Electricity and Economy in Franklinist France"
"Rival Idioms for a Revolutionized Science and a Republican Citizenry"