Robert darnton biography
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In 1964, Robert Darnton was writing for the New York Times, something nearly everyone in his family has done. He was covering the New York City crime beat, but found himself doing odd things like bringing the 1860 historical masterwork The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt into police headquarters, concealing the book from New York’s finest inside more acceptable reading matter—a copy of Playboy. “After writing all these crime stories, covering rapes and murders and armed robberies, I just felt I’d rather do history,” he says. “I loved doing the research and found it endlessly interesting.”
By then, Darnton, a cultural historian, had already earned his doctorate in history from Oxford, where he had matriculated as a Rhodes Scholar and wrote his dissertation on trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution. Luckily, the eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had advised Darnton’s undergraduate thesis a
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Robert Darnton
American historian (born 1939)
Robert Choate Darnton (born May 10, 1939) is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France.
He was director of the Harvard University Library from 2007 to 2016.
Life
[edit]Darnton was born in New York City. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1957 and Harvard University in 1960, attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, and earned a PhD (DPhil) in history from Oxford in 1964, where he studied with Richard Cobb, among others. The title of his thesis was Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution (1782–1788). He worked as reporter at The New York Times from 1964 to 1965. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard gemenskap of Fellows from 1965 to 1968. Joining the Princeton University faculty in 1968, he was appointed Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. He was president of the Internationa
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Assistant: Arlene Navarro arlene_navarro [at] harvard.edu
Robert Darnton was educated at Harvard University (A.B., 1960) and Oxford University (B.Phil., 1962; D. Phil., 1964), where he was a Rhodes scholar. After a brief stint as a reporter for The New York Times, he became a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He taught at Princeton from 1968 until 2007, when he became Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. He has been a visiting professor or fellow at many universities and institutes for advanced study, and his outside activities include service as a trustee of the New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA) and terms as president of the American Historical Association and the International gemenskap of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Among his honors are a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, election to the French Legion of Honor, the National Humanities Medal con