2009: Dr. Anthony Grafton

Dr. Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. Grafton is noted for his studies of the classical tradition from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1975. Grafton has become one of the most distinguished and influential historians of our time.

Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, co editor, or translator of nine others. His many books include What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe and Worlds Made By Words, Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Two collections of essays, Defenders of the Text (1991) and Bring out Your Dead (2001), cover most of the topics and themes that appeal to him.

He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award (2003)