I specialize in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (16th-17th centuries), with an emphasis on France. My interests include the history of the book and of education, the history of the disciplines and of scholarship, early modern natural philosophy and its interactions with religion.

Selected Publications

• Too Much to Know: managing scholarly information before the modern age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
  
  • Supplement to the footnotes: foreign language quotations
  • Supplement to the printing history of the Polyanthea: survey of extant copies from on-line library catalogs by Morgan Sonderegger  
  • Supplement to the printing history of the Theatrum and Magnum Theatrum: survey of extant copies from on-line library catalogs by Morgan Sonderegger


Selected Associated Publicity for "Too Much to Know"

• "Information Overload, the early years,” Boston Sunday Globe, Nov 28 2010
• NPR, Talk of the Nation, Nov 29 2010
• Michael Dirda, "Looking it up, long before Britannica", Washington Post, Jan 12 2011
• Featured in Adam Gopnik, "The Information", The New Yorker, Feb 14 2011
• To the Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio, Sept 4 2011
• Jacob Soll, "Note This," The New Republic, Sept 15, 2011, pp. 40-43
• Richard Serjeantson, "A large work," Times Literary Supplement, Sept 16, 2011, p. 29
• Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology and Society, Mar 7 2012
• Paula Findlen, “Before the Flood,” The
  Nation, May 2, 2011, pp. 34-3
• Co-author with Nicholas Popper, AHA Biography of Anthony Grafton, outgoing president in January 2012

Selected Other Works

• “Tables et index dans le livre de savoir en Europe moderne,” in Lieux de Savoir, vol. 2: Les Mains de I'intellect, ed. Christian Jacob (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011), 552-69 http://lieuxdesavoir.blogspot.com/
• Co-editor (with Richard Yeo), "Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe," special issue of Intellectual History Review vol. 20 no 3 (2010) and “The Rise of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe,” Intellectual History Review 20:3 (2010), 303-16.
• "Textbooks and Methods of Note-Taking in Early Modern Europe," in Scholarly Knowledge: Textbooks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Emidio Campi, Simone de Angelis, Anja-Silvia Goeing and Anthony Grafton (Geneva: Droz, 2008), pp. 39-73.
• "Errata lists and the reader as corrector," in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist and Eleanor F. Shevlin (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, in association with The Center for the Book, Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 2007), pp. 21-41.
  

• "Organizations of Knowledge," in Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 287-303.
• "Science and Religion," in Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6: Reform and Expansion, 1500-1660, ed. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 427-45.
• "Natural Philosophy" in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 365-405.
• "Note-Taking as an Art of Transmission," Critical Inquiry 31 (2004), pp. 85-107.
• "Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload, ca. 1550-1700," Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), pp. 11-28.
• The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
  
  • Full transcription of the annotations in one surviving copy of Bodin’s Universae Naturae Theatrum




Additional publications can be found on Ann Blair's page on Digital Access Scholarship at Harvard.

Contact Info

Center for Government and International Studies-South Building

Room S437

1730 Cambridge Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

amblair@fas.harvard.edu

617.495.0752

_____________________________

Courses I'm teaching this year

Fall 2011:
- History 81j What Was an Early Modern Author?
- History 1151 Culture and Society in Early Modern France, 1500-1715

 

Spring 2012: on leave

Complete Publications

Courses Previously Taught

Curriculum Vitae

Grad Reading Lists

1. Early Modern France & Early Modern Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History
2. History of the Book

Intellectual History at Harvard

Early Modern History Workshop &
          Annual Conference

History of the Book at Harvard

"Early Paper: Techniques and
          Transmissions,"
          February 12, 2010

“Why Books?” A conference on
          Oct 28-29, 2010

Natalie Zemon Davis Symposium,
         Nov 7-8, 2008

Radcliffe Institute Workshop:
         Opening up the Archives
         April 2006