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 Society 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 conferred by President Obama in February 2012,
and the Del Duca World Prize in the Humanities awarded by the Institut
de France in 2013. He has written and edited many books, including The
Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie
(1979, an early attempt to develop the history of books as a field of
study), The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural
History (1984, probably his most popular work, which has been translated
into 18 languages), Berlin Journal, 1989-1990, (1991, an account of the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany), and The
Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (1995, a study of the
underground book trade). His latest books are The Case for Books (2009),
The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander in France from Louis
XIV to Napoleon (2009), and Poetry and the Police: Communication
Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (2010).
Spoke at CES
