Anthony Grafton, Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, will return to SU campus April 7-8

Anthony Grafton, Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities, will return to SU campus April 7-8April 01, 2003Kelly Homan Rodoskikahoman@syr.edu

Anthony Grafton, the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities in The College of Arts and Sciences, will return to Syracuse University April 7 and 8 to deliver a public lecture and participate in multidisciplinary colloquia on campus.

The public lecture, “The Past is a Foreign Country: Travel and Historical Sensibility in the Western Tradition,” will be held April 7 at 7:30 p.m. in Kittredge Auditorium in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Grafton will also conduct a colloquium for the Department of English on “Who Was Doctor Faustus? The Rise of Learned Magic in Renaissance Europe” on April 7 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in Room 320 of the Hall of Languages; an informal talk for the Department of Fine Arts on “Renaissance Humanism and the Fine Arts” on April 8 from 1 to 3 p.m. in the Kilian Room, Room 500 of the Hall of Languages; and a colloquium for the Department of History on “The Time Lord: Joseph Scaliger and the Measurement of Time Past,” April 8 from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in 151 Eggers Hall.

Grafton lectured on the SU campus in late February as part of the visiting professorship, which is hosted this semester by the Department of History in The College of Arts and Sciences.

“Those who were fortunate enough to attend his first lectures here on a snowy night in February were enthralled as much by his delivery as his subject matter,” says Joseph Levine, Distinguished Professor of History. “Grafton entertains while he teaches and one comes away from his presentations both enlightened and amused. His coming visit will show us again something of the extraordinary range of his knowledge and his great gifts of exposition. He is truly one of the most exemplary proponents of humanist scholarship in our time, both in what he says and the way he says it.”

Grafton is the Dodge Professor of History and director of the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. He has authored more than a dozen scholarly works and numerous articles and has published regularly in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic and the American Scholar. He was the curator of exhibitions at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress which inspired two catalogs with interdisciplinary appeal: “New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Recovery” (1992) and “Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture” (1993).

He was appointed visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the WissenschaftesKolleg zu Berlin, as well as from institutions in Wolfenbuttel, Vienna and from the Hebrew University, the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley.

Grafton received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. He is the author of “Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship” (1990) and “The Footnote: A Curious History” (1997). His most recent works include “The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer” (1999), “Leon Batista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance” (2001) and “Bring Out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation” (2002).

The Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities was established to bring to SU those scholars and writers whose work is of great importance for the humanities. Previous holders of the professorship include Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Stephen Greenblatt, Toni Morrison and Martha Nussbaum, among others. The professorship was made possible by the generosity of the late Jeannette K. Watson. The opportunities provided by the professorship are consistent with initiatives in the University’s Academic Plan directed at expanding multidisciplinary discourse for students.