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Jessica Riskin

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Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, working on the intersection of science, politics, culture, and philosophy in the early modern period. She is the author of several books on the history of science, including Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002); The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society; and most recently The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin, 2026).

Jessica Riskin is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University, working on the intersection of science, politics, culture, and philosophy in the early modern period. She is the author of several books on the history of science, including Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002); The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society; and most recently The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin, 2026).

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