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 species; as well as the ...

, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

. 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) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

in 2009. She also serves on the Editorial Board of the

Journal of the History of Ideas The ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering intellectual history, conceptual history, and the history of ideas, including the histories of philosophy, literature and the arts, natural and soci ...

Early career

Blair studied at

, the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

and

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

. 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 The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and colloquially called the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to typically between 20 and ...

*2014

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

*2019

Panizzi Lectures The Panizzi Lectures are a series of annual lectures given at the British Library by "eminent scholars of the book" and named after the librarian Anthony Panizzi. They are considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series alongside ...

*2022-2023 Lyell Readership in Bibliography *2023 Honorary doctorate from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland)

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 Department of History faculty MacArthur Fellows Radcliffe fellows Intellectual historians 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