Anthony Grafton

Dubbed 'the Alchemist of Erudition' by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Anthony Grafton is renowned for his ability to entice readers through dense historical subject matter with his sparkling prose. His essays and reviews appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and The American Scholar and have opened up the world of classical scholarship to an expanded audience.

Author of over a dozen books, including a major two-volume study on Renaissance humanist Joseph Scaliger, Grafton focuses his scholarly attentions on the history of the classical tradition, particularly during the Renaissance. He also lectures on and writes about the history of science and the history of books and readers. His most recent publication, entitled Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation, released by Harvard University Press in January 2002, looks at collaborative scholarly communities of the Renaissance era and the ways in which their work with ancient texts contributed to a transformation of the study of nature.

On September 10, 2002, Grafton was awarded a prestigious Balzan Prize from the International Balzan Foundation "for his outstanding work on the history of scholarship, especially of the classical tradition in European intellectual history since the Renaissance, including the history of the evolution of scholarly practices, techniques and attitudes, and the links between humanist learning and the development of modern science."

Grafton is currently Dodge Professor of History and Director of Historical Studies at Princeton, having joined the faculty in 1975. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and studied for a brief period at University College London. His many honors include the Behrman Prize for Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton, a visiting professorship at the École Normale Supèrieure in Paris, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He has delivered the J.H. Gray Lectures at Cambridge, the E.A. Lowe Lectures in Paleography and Kindred Subjects at Oxford, the Rothschild Lecture in the History of Science at Harvard, and the Meyer Schapiro Lectures at Columbia University. Between 1998-99, he served as Warburg Professor in Hamburg, Germany.

Books by Anthony Grafton

• Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation (Harvard University, 2002).
• Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
• Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Harvard University Press, 1991).
• The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997).
• Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton University Press, 1990).
• From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine (Harvard University Press, 1986).
• Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford University Press, 1993).
• New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992).
• Proof and Persuasion in History, edited by Anthony Grafton and Suzanne L. Marchand (Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
• Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, edited by Anthony Grafton (Yale University Press, 1993).
• The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

Selected Reviews and Articles by Anthony Grafton

• "A Journey to the End of the Millenium: A Novel" (Review). New York Review of Books vol. 46, no. 11 (June 24, 1999):34.
  "Arendt and Eichmann at the Dinner Table," American Scholar vol. 68, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 105.
• "The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome" (Review). New York Review of Books vol. 46, no. 4 (March 4, 1999): 14.
• "Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters" (Review). New York Review of Books vol. 45, no.17 (November 5, 1998): 14.
• "The Death of the Footnote (Report on an Exaggeration)." Wilson Quarterly vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 72.
• "Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism" (Review). New Republic vol. 217, no. 21 (November 24, 1997).
• "The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape" (Review). New York Review of Books vol. 44, no. 13 (August 14, 1997): 49.
• "The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization" (Review). New York Review of Books vol. 44, no. 6 (April 10, 1997): 57.
• "Printed Commonplace: Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought" (Review). Times Literary Supplement no. 4896 (January 31, 19997): 10.
  
• "Johannes Vermeer: Catalog of the Exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C." (Review). New York Review of Books vol. 43, no. 1 (January 11, 1996): 27.
  
• "Landscape and Memory" (Review). New Republic vol. 213, no. 6 (August 7, 1995): 37.
  
• "God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne" (Review). New Republic vol. 212, no. 5 (January 30, 1995): 36.