Ann Blair
Ann Blair is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University, where she teaches in book history and the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe (with a focus on France and Northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). She is the author of The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton University Press, 1997), which was designed as a “total history” of a book of encyclopedic natural philosophy of 1596. Most recently she studied reference books in manuscript and print c.1500–1650 in Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010). She is especially interested in practices of learning and scholarship in early modern Europe, including note-taking and composing. She is currently working on a book version of the Rosenbach Lectures she delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 on amanuenses and authorship in early modern Europe.