Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1975. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He is the author and coauthor of numerous books, including Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (1990); Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (2020); and The Art of Discovery: Digging into the Past in Renaissance Europe (2022).
Pamela Smith is Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, Director of the Center for Science and Society, and Chair of the Studies of the Dutch-Speaking World.
Professor Grafton will speak about the intellectual culture of Dutch humanism in the early modern period, focusing on the University of Leiden. The talk will shine new light on the collection of early Dutch books from the library of the Holland Society of New York, on deposit in the collections of Columbia University since 1901.
The Lecture is organized by Arnoud Visser, Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University, and Professor of Textual Culture in the Renaissance, University of Utrecht, in collaboration with the Studies of the Dutch-Speaking World at Columbia University, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the European Institute, the Department of History, the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Medieval and Renaissance Program, and the Holland Society of New York.
