Professor Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and taught at Iowa State University and at MIT before coming to Stanford. Her research interests include Enlightenment science, politics and culture, and the history of scientific explanation. She is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and is currently writing a book on the history of artificial life since the seventeenth century, as inseparably connected with the history of notions of consciousness and selfhood. The book's working title is The Android's I: A Joint History of Consciousness and Artificial Life. She recently did a radio interview about this work-in-progress, which you can hear at http://www.wbez.org/audio_library/od_radec03.asp#02. In October 2003, she hosted a Workshop on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life at Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/ALworkshop/.

