Howard Hotson is Professor of Early Modern Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.[1]
Life and career
Born in the United States and raised in Canada, Hotson was educated at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has held research fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Institut für Europäische Geschichte (Mainz),[2] Brasenose College (Oxford), the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies (UCLA),[3] the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte (Göttingen),[4][circular reference] and the British Academy (London). Between 2009 and 2014 he was President of the International Society for Intellectual History.[5]
Since 2009 he has helped to pioneer the application of digital tools and methods to intellectual history by directing a series of collaborative research projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York, NY), Horizon 2020 (EU), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and the Packard Humanities Institute (Los Altos, CA). These include Early Modern Letters Online[6] (a collaboratively populated a digital union catalogue of early modern learned correspondence), Reassembling the Republic of Letters, 1500-1800[7] (which negotiated a ‘digital framework for multi-lateral collaboration on Europe’s intellectual history’), and Cabinet: Digital Transformation of Teaching through Objects[8] (an Oxford-based platform for teaching with objects, images and digital multimedia).
In 2011 he emerged as a prominent critic of the marketization of UK higher education in an article in the London Review of Books.[9] He subsequently wrote extensively on the subject in the Times Higher Education[10]
and elsewhere, co-founding with Sir Keith Thomas the Council for the Defence of British Universities,[11] of which he is a trustee.
He was married to the Italian-British philosopher Maria Rosa Antognazza until her death in March 2023.[12]
