Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton
Darnton in 2006
Born	(1939-05-10) May 10, 1939 New York City, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Historian, Librarian
Subject	Cultural History, 18th Century France, History of the Book
Notable works	The Great Cat Massacre
Relatives	Byron Darnton John Darnton

Robert Choate Darnton (born May 10, 1939) is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France.

Life

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 Ph.D. (D. Phil.) in history from Oxford in 1964, where he studied with Richard Cobb, among others. He worked as reporter at The New York Times from 1964 to 1965. 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 served as President of the American Historical Association in 1999.

On July 1, 2007, he transferred to emeritus status at Princeton, and was appointed Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, succeeding Sidney Verba,. In January 2016 Ann Blair will succeed him as the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor.

In 1983 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title The Meaning of Mother Goose.

Darnton is a pioneer in the field of the history of the book. He is writing about electronic publishing. He is founder of the Gutenberg-e program, sponsored by Mellon Foundation.

Darnton is a trustee of the New York Public Library.

Awards and honors

His first major prize was the Leo Gershoy Award for The Business of Enlightenment in 1979. He has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism for The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

In 1999 he was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, an award given by the French government, in recognition of his work. In 2004 he was awarded the Gutenberg prize by the International Gutenberg Society.

In 2005 he received an award for distinguished achievement from the American Printing History Association.

On February 13, 2012 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal 2011 by President Barack Obama, for his determination to make knowledge accessible to everyone.

In 2013 he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca lifetime achievement award.

Family

His brother is the retired New York Times editor and author John Darnton, and his father was the war correspondent Byron Darnton.

Works

• "In Search of the Enlightenment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 43, No. 1, March 1971
• Coauthored with Daniel Roche:
• Coauthored with Marie-Alyx Revellat:

See also

• History of the book

External links

• Darnton on the Gutenberg-e Program
• Articles by Robert Darnton from The New York Review of Books
• Works by or about Robert Darnton in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Robert Darnton, An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris, AHA Presidential Address Retrieved April 19, 2010
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Darnton on George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century, August 31, 2003.