The Social Network of Benjamin Franklin, Printer

Franklin is best known, of course, as a printer (of many things, including books), but we've discovered that his life as a printer was enmeshed in a broader world of correspondence. His correspondence world, in short, became a book (the 30+ volumes of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin). This event will be run as an open-ended dialogue to explore interesting questions together: an introduction to Professor Winterer's data on the Franklin correspondence network, opening into a discussion with the group of the conjoined worlds of manuscript and published works in the long eighteenth century.

Caroline Winterer is Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center, and also Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics. An intellectual and cultural historian of early America in its transatlantic contexts, she is a contributor to Stanford’s collaborative Mapping the Republic of Letters project, and Smithsonian Magazine recently recognized her digital analysis of Benjamin Franklin’s social network with its 2013 American Ingenuity Award in the historical scholarship category. Her books include The American Enlightenment: Treasures from the Stanford University Libraries (2011); The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (2007); and The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (2002).

----------

Refreshments provided; all are welcome; contact organizer to request pre-circulated reading