Next week, on Thursday, October 15, 2026, Dr. Anthony Grafton (2004 Resident) will deliver a public lecture at the American Academy of Rome on the occasion of being awarded the 2026 International Prize for History by the International Committee of Historical Sciences (CISH).
Dr. Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University and a Trustee Emeritus of the American Academy in Rome. His research focuses on the history of science and early modern Europe. His lecture is entitled The Undocumented Past: Conjectural History in Renaissance Europe.
In anticipation of the lecture, and in honor of Dr. Grafton receiving the prestigious award, in the centennial year of the organization, we are publishing a brief interview with Dr. Grafton.
What does receiving the 2026 International Prize for History mean to you, personally and/or professionally?
I’m an intellectual historian—a historian of the ways in which scholars and scientists did their work. When I chose to concentrate in this field, it was anything but popular, and some informed observers claimed that it was in a state of terminal decline. I take this prize as a kind of vote of approval for this kind of work from my discipline. My chief hope is that it will encourage early career scholars to pursue their interests wherever they take them.
What was your experience as a Resident at the Academy in 2004, and how did the environment and community shape your work going forward?
In 2004, I spent the winter and spring at the Academy, looking out over the gardens, my windows open—except when it rained!—to admit the soft Roman air. My stay allowed me to accomplish several things. I was working on a book on proof correctors, the scholars who worked for early printers, and whose job description included far more than proof correction. They advised on which books should be printed, marked up the texts, corrected the proofs, and prepared a growing range of aids for readers, such as title pages, tables of contents, and indexes. Working in the Vatican Library, the Biblioteca Casanatense, the Biblioteca Corsiniana, and the excellent library of the Academy, I found primary evidence of many kinds for my study.
I also had the chance to read wonderful work by Italian scholars that can be very hard to find even in the best American libraries, and to meet a few of them, who showed me great kindness. They taught me that many of the tasks of the correctors were developed beforehand, before handpress printing was introduced to Europe, to produce manuscripts, and their work and advice led me to rich cases in point. The finished book, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe, was published in 2011.
What does it mean to deliver this lecture, and receive the 2026 International Prize for History, at the American Academy in Rome of all places?
It’s always both exhilarating and terrifying to give a lecture of this very public kind. It means addressing a large and mixed audience and trying to convey complicated issues in as engaging and accessible a way as possible. Ideally, a lecture like this should give an example or two of the kind of questions that you ask and the ways in which you try to solve them. At the same time, it’s important to say something brief about where you come from, about the debts you owe to teachers, librarians, students—everyone whose questions, advice, and criticism made your work possible.
What do you hope the audience takes away from your lecture, or in other words, what do you hope to convey?
I hope the audience takes away one big point. There are a lot of debates nowadays about the ways in which historians work. Many critics claim that some contemporary historians do not respect the evidence as their predecessors did—that they have replaced research with guesswork. I will show that some of the pioneers of early modern scholarship engaged in what they called conjectural history—a disciplined and serious effort to go beyond the story that their sources transmitted and to create new narratives, not by falsification or invention but by reasoned argument. And I will try to draw a larger lesson: that we can enrich our discussions of history in the present by turning to history’s past.