Stanford Report, January 25, 2006

Princeton scholar to deliver Camp lecture

Princeton scholar Anthony Grafton, widely regarded as the leading humanist historian in North America, will deliver the 2006 Harry Camp Memorial Lecture series from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2.

Grafton, the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, will present four talks, including two lectures and two seminars, all of which will be based "in one way or another with the history of historical thought," Grafton said. The lectures and seminars will be held at the Stanford Humanities Center and are free and open to the public.

Grafton's scholarly breadth ranges from Renaissance scholarship to the history of art to cosmology to alchemy to the history of education, said Seth Lerer, the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities, who previously taught at Princeton with Grafton. Grafton is considered the most popular undergraduate lecturer at Princeton, as well as the most "intellectually vivacious" graduate teacher and supervisor, Lerer added.

The lectures—"The First Theorists of History" at 7 p.m. Jan. 30 and "The Life and Death of a Genre" at 5 p.m. Feb. 1—will be based on a portion of a book that Grafton currently is writing. The subject of both will be a wave of pioneering treatises on how to write and read history that appeared in the 16th and 17h centuries, Grafton said.

"I try to explain why these began to be written and gradually became something of an intellectual vogue," he said. The lectures will explore the range of works and writers that formed parts of the genre, and examine why the genre seemed to have lost intellectual steam by the beginning of the 17th century, he said.

The first seminar, "History's Postmodern Fates," will meet at 4 p.m. Jan. 31 to look at the discipline of history in the United States over the last 50 years. The second, "Chronology and Its Discontents: How to Write the History of a Forgotten Discipline," will meet at 4 p.m. Feb. 2 to discuss the "massively popular field" of biblical chronology in the 17th century, Grafton said.

Grafton is the author of numerous books, including Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Humanism in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (1991) and The Footnote: A Curious History (1997).