Keynote Speakers

Ann Blair is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Harvard University, where she teaches in book history and the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe (with a focus on France and Northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries). She is the author of The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton UP, 1997) which was designed as a “total history” of a book of encyclopedic natural philosophy of 1596. Most recently she studied reference books in manuscript and print ca 1500-1650 in Too Much To Know: managing scholarly information before the modern age (Yale UP, 2010). She is currently working on a book version of the Rosenbach Lectures she delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 on amanuenses and authorship in early modern Europe.

David Weinberger, Ph.D., writes about the effect of the Internet on our ideas. He has a background in philosophy (a Ph.D. from University of Toronto and six years teaching college), and is  a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. For almost five years he co-directed Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab, overseeing a set of creative developers, and initiating and managing LibraryCloud, an open library metadata server.

He is the author of several well-regarded books about the Net, including co-authoring The Cluetrain Manifesto, considered a the seminal work in Internet business. He is the author of Everything Is Miscellaneous,a book about the profound changes in how we understand the organization of the things in our world, and Too Big to Know about the networking of knowledge.  Dr. Weinberger has written many times for Harvard Business Review and Wired, and his work has appeared in journals as diverse as Scientific American, The Atlantic.com, Science, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, Salon, Smithsonian, USAToday, and TV Guide. He blogs for CNN.com has been an advisor to  presidential campaigns. He was a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department 209-2011 and a fellow at the Harvard Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

Planning Committee
Michele Cloonan, Simmons College, Co-Chair
Melanie Kimball, Simmons College, Co-Chair
Benjamin Abrahamse, MIT
Sid Berger, Peabody Essex Museum & Simmons College
Tom Bolze, Yale University
Beth Caroll-Horrocks, Massachusetts State Library
Hope Mayo, Harvard University
Tom Michalak, Harvard University—retired
Oceana Wilson, Bennington College
Kathy Wisser, Simmons College

Program Committee
Melanie Kimball, Simmons College, Chair
Benjamin Abrahamse, MIT
Tom Bolze, Yale University
Tom Glynn, Rutgers University
Hope Mayo, Harvard University
Kathy Wisser, Simmons College

Student Assistants

Jennifer Gray, Graduate Assistant
Maggie Anderson, Dean’s Fellow for International Initiatives and Events Coordination
Dory Klein