From left, Joyce E. Chaplin, Nicole Eustace, Evelynn M. Hammonds
On Saturday, November 2, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of FRANKLINLAND, the raucous new comedy by Lloyd Suh, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback discussion with historians Joyce E. Chaplin, Nicole Eustace, and Evelynn Hammonds about the cultural, historical, and scientific background of the play.
FRANKLINLAND is the story of growing up as the only son of Benjamin Franklin: the greatest scientific mind in the world, inventor of the lightning rod and the urinary catheter and the glass harmonica and bifocal glasses and, oh yeah, in his spare time the United States of America.
The audience will have the opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.
FRANKLINLAND, written by Lloyd Suh and directed by Chika Ike, is the Fall 2024 mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the world of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-fifth year.
About the Panelists
Dr. Joyce E. Chaplin
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, where she is affiliated with the departments of History and History of Science, and with the Graduate School of Design. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has taught at six universities on two continents, an island, and a peninsula, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. A prize-winning author, her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Estonian. Her recent works include The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius, Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit, and (as editor) Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography: A Norton Critical Edition. Her new book, The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution, was supported by a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her reviews and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times. A long time ago, she used to be a stage manager.
Dr. Evelynn M. Hammonds
Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the history of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race, gender and sexuality in the histories of medicine, science and public health in the United States; black feminist and queer theory and the history of disease and race. She is the author of Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (1999), and, with Rebecca Herzig, The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (2008).
About the Moderator
Dr. Nicole Eustace
Nicole Eustace is Julius Silver Family Professor of History at New York University, where she has leadership roles in both the history of women and gender program and the Atlantic history workshop. A historian of the early modern Atlantic and the early United States, she specializes in the history of emotion. She is the author of Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Her other books include 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (2012), Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (2008), and Warning for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812 (2017), co-edited with Fredrika J. Teute.
FRANKLINLAND began previews on October 9 and runs through November 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.
