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 is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize.

Grafton was born on May 21, 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut.

He was educated at Phillips Academy (Andover).

He made Phi Beta Kappa in 1970, with honors in history and in the college.

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.

Grafton married Louise Erlich in 1972, and was married to her until her death in 2019.

They had two children.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

In 1996, he delivered the Triennial E. A. Lowe Lectures at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, speaking on Ancient History in Early Modern Europe.

His most original and accessible book is The Footnote: A Curious History (1997; originally published in German in 1995 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.

From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

In 2006, he became co-editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, together with Warren Breckman, Martin Burke, and Ann Moyer.

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.

From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association.