2004 Robert Darnton

Born in New York City in 1939, the historian Robert Darnton is considered one of the most important historians of ideas of the past decades. He studied American History and Literature at the Harvard University and European History at the University of Oxford. Darnton has published numerous works, including his dissertation on mesmerism and the end of the Enlightenment, which has been translated into five languages. For a short time, the historian worked as a reporter for the New York Times before becoming a professor at Princeton University in 1968. He has been a professor at Harvard since 2007 where he heads the University Library.
Darnton is one of the ancestors of the so-called "cultural turn", the emergence of cultural studies in the second half of the 20th century. His focus is not on the starting point of an idea, but its impact on society and its dissemination in the public. In 2004, Robert Darnton received the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz and the International Gutenberg Society for his clear view of the tasks of historical research and his conception of the book and other printed matter such as pamphlets as a privileged media for the revival of the past.