Ann M. Blair (born 1961) is an American historian, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University. She specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe (16th-17th centuries), with an emphasis on France. Her interests include the history of the book and of reading, the history of the disciplines and of scholarship, and the history of interactions between science and religion. She is most widely known for being the author of the bestselling book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (2010). Blair was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2009.

Early career

Blair studied at Harvard University, the University of Cambridge and Princeton University. At Princeton, she was the second graduate student of Anthony Grafton. She defended a dissertation entitled 'Restaging Jean Bodin: the Universae Naturae Theatrum (1596) in its cultural context' in 1990, which became the basis of her 1997 book.

Professor

Since 1996, she has taught at Harvard University. She was named a Harvard College Professor in 2009 for outstanding undergraduate teaching, and has received numerous teaching awards since then, including the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize for 2018. She received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2014. Four seniors for whom Blair was adviser won the Hoopes Prize for outstanding senior thesis, a prize that Blair herself won when a student at Harvard College. She is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Major awards

Publications

Books

Articles and chapters