Caroline Winterer - If Ben Franklin Had Facebook

Stanford Professor Caroline Winterer specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America in its transatlantic contexts. She focuses on the history of scholarship, books, reading, libraries, and education as well as on the history of art and material culture. She is also interested in the many ways in which the early Americans have made sense of the past, from the deep past of earth history to the more recent antiquity of ancient Mediterranean peoples and American Indians. She is currently working on Stanford's collaborative Mapping of the Republic of Letters project, which is digitally mapping some of the major European and American correspondence networks and libraries of the early modern scholarly world (1500-1800). As a part of this project she is mapping the extensive correspondence network of Benjamin Franklin, as well as the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the leading library of Enlightenment America.

In addition to authoring 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; pb 2004), she has also published articles in the Journal of American History, the American Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and Modern Intellectual History. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is the current director of the Stanford Humanities Center.

Our event’s venue at the Greenwich Historical Society has its own interesting local history.  To learn more about the Bush Holley House, read the Greenwich Time newspaper article entitled "Quite an Impression".