James Delbourgo was educated at East Anglia, Cambridge and Columbia universities, and previously taught at McGill University, Montreal. In 2008, he became Associate Professor in the History of Science and the Atlantic World at Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey. He has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Atlantic and Cabinet Magazine. His previous books include A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (2006), which won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize. In 2016, he was Visiting Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. Collecting the World won the British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize (2019), the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize (2019), the American Historical Association Leo Gershoy Award (2018) and the Louis Gottschalk Prize (2018).