Jessica Riskin

Jessica Riskin is a historian of science and Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University in the United States. She is also the Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford.^[1][2]

Biography[]

She grew up in New York City and is the daughter of literary critic Myra Jehlen and political economist and China scholar Carl Riskin.

Riskin received her B.A. in History and Science from Harvard University, where she wrote an Honors thesis under the supervision of Stephen Jay Gould, and her Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley, where her dissertation advisor was J.L. Heilbron. In 1988-89 she studied at the Ecole polytechnique in Paris as an intern in the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée. In 1995–96, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in Science in Human Culture in the History Department at Northwestern University. She then taught in the History Department at Iowa State University and in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT, where she held the Leo Marx Assistant Professorship in the History and Culture of Science and Technology from 1998 to 2001. She has also taught at Sciences Po, Paris, where she held the inaugural chair in Humanités Scientifiques in 2011–2012.^[3]

Riskin wrote the 2016 book The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick,^[4] which was a pick for most influential book of the past 20 years in the Chronicle of Higher Education^[5][6] and is included in The Guardian's 2019 list "The Book that Changed My Mind" ^[7] and has won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society.^[8] A Chinese translation was published in July 2020.^[9]

Riskin also wrote Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment,^[10] which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize. She edited Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life and, with Mario Biagioli, Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present which was designated by CHOICE magazine as an "essential" book in 2013.^[11]

Riskin is the winner of the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society.^[8]

She is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books,^[12] where in 2019 she published a book review of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now.^[13]

Riskin appears in passing as a character in Peter Carey's 2012 novel The Chemistry of Tears.^[14] This cameo appearance springs from her article "The Defecating Duck, Or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life," which appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2003.^[15]

Riskin was the 9th-place winner in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for 1984. Her project in plasma physics was conducted at Columbia University under the supervision of Gerald Navratil, Thomas Alva Edison Professor of Applied Physics.^[16][17][18]

Publications[]

BOOKS

The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016)

Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (co-edited with Mario Biagioli, 2012)

Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (edited volume, 2007)

Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002)

ESSAYS

“When Engineers were Humanists.” In New York Review of Books 11 March 2021.

“Evolution Wars: The Saga Continues.” In Los Angeles Review of Books, 20 October 2020, at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/evolution-wars-the-saga-continues/

“Just Use Your Thinking Pump!” In New York Review of Books, 2 July 2020, p. 187.

“Pinker’s Pollyannish Philosophy and its Perfidious Politics.” In Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 December 2019, at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pinkers-pollyannish-philosophy-and-its-perfidious-politics/

“Alive and Ticking.” In Aeon, 30 August 2018, https://aeon.co/essays/can-animals-be-usefully-described-as-clockwork-machines

“Frolicsome Engines: The Long Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence.” 'Public Domain Review, 4 May 2016: https://publicdomainreview.org/2016/05/04/frolicsome-engines-the-long-prehistory-of-artificial-intelligence/

"Machines in the Garden.” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 2 (April 3, 2010): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/59

“The Defecating Duck; or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life.” In Critical Inquiry Summer 2003, Vol. 29, No. 4: 599-633

“Eighteenth Century Wetware.” In Representations, Summer 2003, No. 83: 97-125.

“The Lawyer and the Lightning Rod.” In Science in Context, 12, 1 (1999): 61-99.

Public History[]

Technological Revolutions in Art History, The Frick Collection, New York City, 15 October 2020, https://www.frick.org/interact/miniseries/technological_revolutions/part_I_jessica_riskin

Podcast interview on EconTalk with host Russ Roberts, 11 February 2019, at http://www.econtalk.org/jessica-riskin-on-life-machinery-and-the-restless-clock/

Radio interview on Ockham's Razor, hosted by Robyn Williams, ABC Radio, 22 May 2016, at https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/the-restless-clock/7429734

Radio interview on Odyssey, a daily talk show of ideas produced by WBEZ, hosted by Gretchen Helfrich, on “The History of Artificial Intelligence,” 2 December 2003, at https://archive.org/details/Odyssey_WBEZ_Chicago_Public_Radio/od_031202.rm

References[]