Ann M. Blair (born 1961) is an American

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...

, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

. 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 is most widely known for being the author of the bestselling book '' Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age'' (2010). Blair was elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

in 2009. She graduated from Mercersburg Academy in

Mercersburg, Pennsylvania Mercersburg is a borough in Franklin County, located near the southern border of Pennsylvania, United States. The borough is southwest of Harrisburg, the state capital. Due to its location in a rural area, it had a relatively large percentage ...

in 1979.

Early career

Blair studied at

, the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

and

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

. At Princeton, she was the second graduate student of

Anthony Grafton Anthony Thomas Grafton (born May 21, 1950) is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He i ...

. She defended a dissertation entitled 'Restaging Jean Bodin: the Universae Naturae Theatrum (1596) in its cultural context' in 1990, which became the basis of her 1997 book.

Professor

Since 1996, she has taught at

. She was named a Harvard College Professor in 2009 for outstanding undergraduate teaching, and has received numerous teaching awards since then, including the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize for 2018. She received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2014. Four seniors for whom Blair was adviser won the Hoopes Prize for outstanding senior thesis, a prize that Blair herself won when a student at Harvard College.Personal Website: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/ablair

Major awards

*2002 MacArthur Fellows Program *2014 Guggenheim Fellowship

Publications

Books

* (ed. with

''The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe''
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, *''The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science'', Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, * '' Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age'', Yale University Press, 2010 * ed. with

, ''Information: A Historical Companion'', Princeton University Press, 2021.

Articles and chapters

*"Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550-1700," ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' 64 (2003), pp. 11–28. *"Note-Taking as an Art of Transmission," ''Critical Inquiry'' 31 (2004), pp. 85–107. *"Natural Philosophy" in ''The Cambridge History of Science'', vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 365–405. *"Organizations of Knowledge," in ''Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy'', ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 287–303. *"Science and Religion," in ''Cambridge History of Christianity'', vol. 6: Reform and Expansion, 1500–1660, ed. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 427–45. *(ed. with Jennifer Milligan), a special issue of ''Archival Science'' 7:4 (2007) entitled "Toward a cultural history of archives," with a co-authored introduction, pp. 289–96 *"Textbooks and Methods of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe," in ''Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe'', ed. Emidio Campi, Simone de Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing and Anthony Grafton (Geneva: Droz, 2008), pp. 39–73. *"Corrections manuscrites et listes d'errata à la Renaissance," in ''Esculape et Dionysos''. Mélanges en l'honneur de Jean Céard, ed. Jean Dupèbe, Franco Giacone, Emmanuel Naya and Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou (Geneva: Droz, 2008), pp. 269–86. *"Disciplinary Distinctions before the 'Two Cultures,'" ''The European Legacy'' 13:5 (2008), pp. 577–88, in a special issue on "The Languages of the Sciences and the Languages of the Humanities," ed. Oren Harman.
The rise of note-taking in Early Modern Europe
''Intellectual History Review'' 20(3): 303-16.

References

External links

"Book Junkies Collect Prizes, Too"
''The Harvard Crimson'', Lauren A.E. Schuker, December 10, 2002 {{DEFAULTSORT:Blair, Ann M 1961 births Living people Harvard University faculty MacArthur Fellows Radcliffe fellows American women historians Harvard University alumni Alumni of the University of Cambridge Princeton University alumni Members of the American Philosophical Society 21st-century American historians 21st-century American women