About the Program
The University of Chicago Paleography and the Book Visiting Scholars Program brings an outstanding guest professor to campus for one quarter annually. The Visiting Scholar teaches a course in manuscript history and reception, paleography, epigraphy, philology, codicology, the history of the book and readers, or the evolution of print culture at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center.
Discover Paleography and the Book
The Division of the Arts & Humanities at the University of Chicago is committed to investigating original sources, their languages and media, as well as their social and political contexts. Our faculty and students produce outstanding critical editions, study and preserve languages from across history and the globe, and have deep command of primary sources and respect for the conditions of their creation. Scholarship on campus encompasses ancient Mediterranean papyri, manuscripts – including illustrated medieval manuscripts–the development of printing, and a plethora of reading practices. Studying the history of writing and the book enriches our understanding of how ideas take shape and are transmitted, the development and circulation of religious beliefs and practices, and the social conditions for scientific evolution. The Paleography and the Book program supports tools indispensable for humanistic inquiry.
About Hanna Holborn Gray
Hanna Holborn Gray, the Harry Pratt Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History, provided the funding to establish the program. A historian with special interests in the history of humanism, political and historical thought, and church history and politics in the Renaissance and the Reformation, she also supports the humanistic study of the history of the book as a trustee of the Newberry Library and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Her most recent publications are Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories (2011) and An Academic Life: A Memoir (2018).