Robert Darnton, born in New York City, New York, USA, in 1939. Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University and Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University.
KB Fellow (Spring 2006)
PUBLISHING AND PERISHING UNDER THE ANCIEN REGIME
In the KB lecture I investigate the vast but unstudied literature of libel that flooded the French book market in the eighteenth century. By concentrating on four interconnected libelles from 1771 to 1793, I combine an analysis of the genre with an account of a colony of French refugees in London, who churned out slanderous attacks on public figures in Versailles and grafted a blackmail operation on to their literary speculations.