Bio

Anja-Silvia Goeing is Professor at the University of Zurich and Associate in History at Harvard University. She works with Professor Ann Blair to organize the early modern book history groups and websites at Harvard University. She is part of a US-based group of scholars in the emerging field of information history.

Her book Storing, Archiving, Organizing: The Changing Dynamics of Scholarly Information Management in Post-Reformation Zurich came out in December 2016 in Brill’s series Library of the Written Word. Her work includes studies on fifteenth-century biographies written about the Italian humanist Vittorino da Feltre (1999; 2014). She has co-edited two volumes about late medieval and early modern textbooks and collectors’ knowledge (2008; 2013), then with Ann Blair, the Festschrift for Anthony Grafton For the Sake of Learning (2016), and lately, with Ann Blair, Paul Duguid and Anthony Grafton at Princeton University Press, Information: A Historical Companion (2021).

From June 2015 to June 2017, she was principal investigator of a British Academy Project "Worlds and Networks of Higher Learning" with workshops in Newcastle upon Tyne, Oxford, Cambridge (where Richard Sergeantson was the internal organizer at Trinity College Cambridge) and the Institute for Historical Research in London. Co-investigators were Mordechai Feingold (Caltech) and Glyn Parry (Roehampton). Together, they published the collected volume Early Modern Universities: Networks of Higher Learning in December 2020.

In June 2018, she started two new projects, one on "Exams, Disputes and Dissertations: The Making of Medical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" with support of a Milton Grant, and a second project with members of Zurich University and with The Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar Universities: Past, Present, Future on  "The Funding of Higher Education: Different Objectives in Switzerland, the UK, and the USA". Both have generated networks, web-presentations, and publications.

In December 2023, she founded together with colleagues the online reading group Global Information History (GIH).

Passionate about global cultural networks, Anja supports a series of schools and education initiatives in Mali (Africa).