Anthony Grafton

Grafton was born on May 21, 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut. He was educated at Phillips Academy (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. He made Phi Beta Kappa in 1970, with honors in history and in the college. After studying at University College, London, under ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano, from 1973 to 1974, he earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in history from the University of Chicago in 1975. He still retains links with the University of London's Warburg Institute.[5]

After a brief period teaching at Cornell's history department, 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.

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 study of the scholarship and chronology of Renaissance scholar Joseph Scaliger (2 vols, 1983–1993), and, more recently, studies of Girolamo Cardano as an astrologer (1999) and Leon Battista Alberti (2000). In 1996, he delivered the Triennial E. A. Lowe Lectures at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, speaking on Ancient History in Early Modern Europe.[6] Together with Lisa Jardine, he also co-wrote a revisionist account of the significance of Renaissance education (From Humanism to the Humanities, 1986) and on the marginalia of Gabriel Harvey.[7]

He also penned several essay collections, including Defenders of the Text (1991), which deals with the relations between scholarship and science in the early modern period, and, most recently, Worlds Made by Words. 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 of how the marginal footnote developed as a central and powerful tool in the hands of historians.

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.

• Los Angeles Times Book Prize, History, 1993
• Balzan Prize for History of the Humanities, 2002
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected 2002[8]
• Fellow of The British Academy, elected 1997[9]
• Honorary degree from Leiden University, 2006[10]
• Honorary degree from University of Oxford, 2013[11]
• The Sigmund H. Danziger, Jr. Memorial Lecture in the Humanities, University of Chicago, 2011
• Rome Prize
• Pour le Mérite
• Guggenheim Fellowship
• Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

• Appearances on C-SPAN