Harvard University History Department

People

Faculty

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).

"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.

Ann Blair

Position: Director of Undergraduate Studies, Harvard College Professor, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History

Field: Early Modern Europe

Specialty: Early Modern France; Early Modern European Intellectual and Cultural History; History of the Book; History of Science

Fall 2012:
- History 2321: Methods in Book History: Seminar
- History 91r: Supervised Reading and Research

Spring 2013:
- Culture and Belief 20: Reason and Faith in the West
- History 91r: Supervised Reading and Research

DUS Office Hours:
Tuesdays 10:30-12pm in Robinson Hall 100. Please sign up here.

Regular Faculty Office Hours:
Mondays 2-4pm in CGIS S437.
Please sign up by emailing me in advance, or if you have a Harvard ID sign up here.