Background

Anthony Grafton was born on May 21, 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut, United States to the family of Samuel and Edith Grafton. Anthony’s father Samuel Grafton (originally Lipschutz) was an editor at the New York Post.

Education

Anthony Grafton was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover. He attended the University of Chicago, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1971 and a Master of Arts degree in 1972. After studying at University College London, under the celebrated ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano, from 1973 to 1974, he earned his Doctor of Philosophy in History from the University of Chicago in 1975.

Career

Grafton teaches European history at Princeton University, where he has worked since 1975. Grafton served for many years as a trustee of the American Academy in Rome and was Resident in Renaissance Studies there during the spring of 2004. He has written articles and reviews for the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Grafton’s special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975. Grafton likes to see the past through the eyes of influential and original writers and has accordingly written intellectual biographies of a 15th-century Italian humanist, architect, and town planner, Leon Battista Alberti; a 16th-century Italian astrologer and medical man, Girolamo Cardano; and a 16th-century French classicist and historian, Joseph Scaliger. He also studies the long-term history of scholarly practices, such as forgery and the citation of sources, and has worked on many other topics in cultural and intellectual history.

Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. Two collections of essays, Defenders of the Text (1991) and Bring Out Your Dead (2001), cover most of the topics and themes that appeal to him. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. At Princeton he is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History.

Along with his expansive scholarly interests, this advisorial orientation has enabled Grafton to contribute to a broad range of graduate work within and outside Princeton. But it has also infused the whole scope of his pedagogical mission at Princeton, where he has spent nearly all his teaching career, though he has also held appointments as visiting professor at the Collège de France, the Louvre, the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in Munich, the Warburg Haus in Hamburg, and Columbia University, as well as visiting fellowships at Merton and Pembroke Colleges, Oxford, and Christ’s and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge. Tenured in 1979, he was Andrew Mellon, then Dodge, Professor of History; since 2000 he has been the Henry Putnam University Professor.

Grafton directed successively Princeton's interdepartmental committee on European Cultural Studies (1995–1998), the Shelby Cullom Davis Center (1999–2003), and the Center for Collaborative History (2007-2012). As Chair of the University’s Council of the Humanities, he was instrumental in founding Princeton's Center for the Study of Books in Media in 2002 and the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows in 2009, as well as a new leave program for faculty who agree to contribute during their leave to intellectual life on campus. Grafton promotes the humanities at all levels, from a humanities outreach program for prospective freshmen to the postdoctoral Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. On campus, he is known as a talented intellectual impresario who masterminds innovative events open to a general public, and as the author of provocative blogs in the Daily Princetonian. He has also been instrumental in implementing institutional changes designed to intensify undergraduate exposure to a liberal arts education, serving as founding director of Princeton’s freshman seminar program.

Achievements

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  Anthony Grafton is one of the most distinguished scholars of Renaissance humanism active today, with over a dozen books on various aspects of early modern European culture. But Grafton's reputation extends well beyond the halls of university history departments. His witty and erudite studies encompass such unlikely topics as the footnote and the forgery, as well as staple figures of Renaissance history such as Leon Battista Alberti and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He ranges from the history of art and literature to the technical details of chronology and science. Through his outstanding and impeccable scholarship, and his accessible, entertaining, but never patronizing writing for the public, Grafton has made scholars and scholarship subjects of wide appeal.
  
  Grafton has been an indefatigable teacher as well, supervising forty-six doctoral students and sitting on the dissertation committees of eighty-one others. His combination of erudition, an extraordinary publication record, and devoted teaching has completely altered the state of intellectual history in the United States. By emphasizing the history of scholarly practices, moribund when he began his career, Grafton has raised the intellectual narrative of early modern Europe to new prominence in history departments at leading universities in the United States.

Works

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• book

  • The Footnote: A Curious History

    (The weapon of pedants, the scourge of undergraduates, the...)

    1997
  • Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West

    (In this book Anthony Grafton lets us in on one of the gre...)

    2009
  • Christianity and the Transformation of the Book

    (Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines ...)

    2009
  • New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery

    (Describing an era of exploration during the Renaissance t...)

    1992
  • Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation

    (The work of the Renaissance humanists comes to life in An...)

    2002
  • Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers

    (The style of reading in Renaissance Europe, as seen in th...)

    1997
  • Forgers and Critics

    (The close links between forgery and criticism throughout ...)

    2019
  • Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance

    (A lucid biographical study of a key figure of European cu...)

    2000
  • I have always loved the Holy Tongue: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship

    (Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) was one of Europe’s greatest P...)

    2011
  • Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer

    (Girolamo Cardano was an Italian doctor, natural philosoph...)

    2000
  • Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Volume I: Textual Criticism and Exegesis

    (This volume is the first half of an intellectual biograph...)

    1983
  • Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800

    (Anthony Grafton is erudite and elegant in the style of th...)

    1991
  • What Was History?

    (From the late fifteenth century onwards, scholars across ...)

    2012
  • Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Volume II: Historical Chronology (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

    (This book describes the later life of Joseph Scaliger (15...)

    1994
  • The Classical Tradition 2013

Religion

Grafton was born in the family of Jewish immigrants and was raised in their traditional religion.

Politics

Grafton shares his father’s liberal political bent, he also has respect for elite traditions and institutions.

Views

Grafton is rather concerned on the education system and is a fierce advocate for its reform.

Quotations: "The cost of a year’s study at a college or university escalates, year upon year. Yet how good is this expensive product? Drop-out rates are frighteningly high: fewer than half of those who enter college will earn an associate’s degree within three years or a BA within six. Even those who finish, moreover, often emerge from college with staggering debts, no technical qualifications, and few basic skills. In 2003, the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy revealed that: “Only 41 percent of graduate students tested could be classified as ‘proficient’ in prose - reading and understanding information in short texts - down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient.” In these circumstances, the critics argue, radical measures are needed: measures that will both cut costs and make education more valuable."

"Wikipedia, though improving, is notably deficient in less-traveled areas and can be downright misleading on politicized questions."

Membership

Being an internationally renowned scholar, Anthony Grafton holds membership in a number of professional and educational institutions across the world. Since his student years, he's a member of Phi Beta Kappa. As an American historian, he's a member of the Renaissance Society of America, American Philosophical Society and American Historical Association. He was the President of the latter in 2011-2012. He is a member of the British Academy of the United Kingdom and a correspondent of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities of Germany.

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  Phi Beta Kappa , United States

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  Renaissance Society of America , United States

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  American Philosophical Society , United States

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  From January 2011 to January 2012, Grafton served as the President.

  American Historical Association , United States

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  British Academy , United Kingdom

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  Correspondent

  Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , Germany

Personality

Grafton's colleagues and students refer to him as an open and easy-going individual. He pays attention to each student individually and his approach to scholarly collaboration leaves his associates in a rather benevolent attitude.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Professor Grafton is an extraordinary teacher. He shows by example that teaching is a mutual contract between teacher and student. When I, then a graduate student at Princeton, first precepted for his survey course on European history, I noticed he had a special morning practice. Every lecture he would arrive early and personally greet each student, as he gave her or him a lecture handout. When I asked Tony why he did that, he told me he liked to get to know each student. His practice of personally handing students a lecture outline, taken deeper, shows how he believes teaching and learning are, at their basis, democratic, participatory, and intimate. This first step of acquaintance and gesture towards a sustained dialogue means teaching is a shared journey of learning rather than a professorial lecture to a hall of nameless students." - Dr. Catherine Abou-Nemeh, Victoria University of Wellington.

Interests

• walking, reading

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Joseph Justus Scaliger, Leon Battista Alberti

Connections

Anthony Grafton married Louise Erlich on May 13, 1972. They have two children: Samuel David and Anna Temma Rachel.

Father:

Samuel Grafton

Mother:

Edith Grafton

Wife:

Louise Erlich

Son:

Samuel David Grafton

Daughter:

Anna Temma Rachel Grafton

mentor:

Arnaldo Momigliano

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998