John Powers

John Powers is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. The former Cain Senior Fellow studies the history of chemistry and related fields in the (long) 18th century. His first book, Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts (Chicago, 2014), examined how the Dutch professor reconfigured chemistry teaching at the University of Leiden to better integrate it into the medical curriculum. As a result, his courses focused as much on the “natural philosophy” of chemistry as they did on practical, chemical operations.

Powers’s current project, tentatively titled “Joseph Priestley in America,” looks at the impact that Priestley’s last 10 years in the U.S. (1794 to 1804) had on the American chemistry and philosophical community—and what this might reveal about the success of the Chemical Revolution going into the 19th century.