Jessica Riskin

Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Department of History, Stanford University

Jessica Riskin is Professor of History at Stanford where she teaches modern European history and the history of science. She was educated at Harvard and UC Berkeley, and has also taught at Iowa State, MIT and Sciences Po, Paris. She is the author most recently of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, which won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society. Her first book, about science and revolution in France, is entitled Science in the Age of Sensibility, and won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major prize for best book in French history. She is currently working on various projects in the history of evolutionary theory.