Margaret Candee Jacob

Distinguished Professor of History. Scholar in three areas of history: the role of Newton's Principia in England's 18th century, the participation of freethinkers in Enlightenment thought, and the contribution of Newtonian mechanics to industrial invention in the eighteenth-century. In a series of books -- Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (1995), The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997), Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire (2006), The Scientific Revolution: A Brief History with Documents (2009), and, with Hunt and Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe (2010)-she has virtually created the field of scientific culture and the industrial revolution. A tireless and enterprising researcher, Jacob has read widely in the Dutch, French, England, and Belgium archives in her determination to chart the influence of Newtonian physics from the laboratory of the workshops of Watt, Boulton, and Wedgewood. In her work on the Masonic movement, pantheists, cosmopolitanism, and the Dutch press, she documented the presence of a radical Enlightenment existing in tandem with the more conventional one. In January of 2012, the American Historical Association devoted a session to assessing the impact of Jacob's scholarship, a rare tribute. Her most recent book is The Secular Enlightenment, 2019, Princeton UP.