Cultural historian of Renaissance Europe to speak Monday at UF

November 6, 2009

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A Princeton University history professor will speak Monday on the University of Florida campus about “Jewish Books and Christian Readers in Early Modern Europe.”

Anthony Grafton, the Henry Putnam Professor of History and Chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton, is a cultural historian of Renaissance Europe. His lecture starts at 7:30 p.m. in Ustler Hall Atrium.

Grafton’s interests lie in the history of books and readers, 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 of more than 10 books and the co-author, editor or translator of many others. Most recently he has published “Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West.”

Grafton has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Balzan Prize for History of the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

His lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by UF’s department of history and the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies. It’s part of the ongoing series “Faithful Narratives: The Challenge of Religion in History,” supported by the Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere, the Center for Jewish Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, and several other outside institutions.

For more information on this or other lectures, please contact Andrea Sterk at sterk@ufl.edu or Nina Caputo at ncaputo@ufl.edu.