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Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University, where she specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (16th-17th centuries), with an emphasis on France. Her interests include the history of the book and of reading, the history of the disciplines and of scholarship, and the history of interactions between science and religion. She recommends these websites for further leads in Harvard activities in Early Modern studies, Book History, and History of Information.

Blair is the author of The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton UP, 1997), and Too Much To Know: managing scholarly information before the modern age (Yale UP, 2010). She has co-edited, with Jennifer Milligan, Toward a Cultural History of Archives, a special issue of Archival Science (2007); with Richard Yeo, Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe, a special issue of Intellectual History Review (2010); with Kaspar von Greyerz, Physico-theology: Religion and Science in Europe 1650-1750 (2019); with Nicholas Popper, New Horizons for Early Modern European Scholarship (2021); and with Paul Duguid, Anthony Grafton and Anja-Silvia Goeing, Information: A Historical Companion (2021). She and Leah Price also organized two conferences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Why Books in 2010 and Take Note 2012. Blair's research focuses on methods of intellectual work among scholars and authors ca. 1500-1700 which she also compares with those of other times and places. She has studied for example methods of reading and note-taking as taught in humanist schools, and practices of composing and using reference works and finding devices. In March 2014 Blair delivered the Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania on the role of amanuenses and the various mostly hidden helpers who worked with authors and scholars in early modern Europe. In December 2019 she delivered the Panizzi lectures at the British Library on Paratexts and Print in Renaissance Humanism. Lecture 1: The Impact of Printing on Paratexts / Lecture 2: Experiments in Humanist Paratexts / Lecture 3: The Limits of Paratexts. In 2021 she delivered two Conférences Léopold Delisle (in French) on paratexts in learned books of the Renaissance, including attention to Erasmus. The lectures were accompanied by a well illustrated short book L'Entour du texte: la publication du livre savant à la Renaissance (Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2021). In May/June 2023 she delivered five Lyell lectures in bibliography and book history at Oxford University: In the scholar's workshop: amanuenses in early modern Europe. She is currently completing a book on this topic.

She is grateful to have received fellowships and awards from many sources including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and was awarded a Harvard College Professorship in 2009 in recognition of her dedication to undergraduate teaching and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She served as chair of the History Department in 2020-2022.

Contact:

Email: amblair at fas dot harvard dot edu

Office phone: 617 495 0752