Anthony Grafton

Anthony Grafton (sometimes Anthony T. Grafton) (born 21 May 1950) is a historian and the current Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. As of January 2011, he serves as the President of the American Historical Association.[1]

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Education

Grafton was educated at Phillips Academy and the University of Chicago, where he took his A.B. and Ph.D. in rapid succession. He studied for one year at University College, London under the celebrated ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano, and retains links with the Warburg Institute, University of London.

Career

After a brief period teaching at Cornell's Department of History, he was appointed to a position at Princeton University in 1975, where he has subsequently remained. Since January 2007, he has been a co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Work

Anthony Grafton is noted for his studies of the classical tradition from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, and in the history of historical scholarship. His many books include a profound study of the scholarship and chronology of the foremost classical scholar of the late Renaissance, Joseph Scaliger (2 vols, 1983–1993), a revisionist account (with Lisa Jardine) of the significance of Renaissance education (From Humanism to the Humanities, 1986), and, more recently, studies of Girolamo Cardano as an astrologer (1999) and Leon Battista Alberti (2000).

The best introduction to his preoccupation with the relations between scholarship and science in the early modern period is perhaps (still) Defenders of the Text (1991). In some ways his most original and accessible book is The Footnote: A curious history (1997; published in German as Die Tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote), a case-study in what might be called the history of history, from below.

He also writes on a wide variety of topics for The New Republic, The American Scholar and The New York Review of Books. He owns a bookwheel which he keeps at hand in his home.

Honours

Works

Books

Essays

References