Robert Townsend

  
  • Director, Washington office
  • American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • Twitter: @rbthisted

I am currently transitioning from the American Historical Association to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, supporting the Humanities Indicators project and general advocacy for the humanities. While at the AHA, I was director of research and publishing and, authored a variety of articles on history, higher education, and electronic publishing. My book, History's Babel: Scholarship, Professionalization and the Historical Enterprise, 1880–1940 (which started as a dissertation with Roy Rosenzweig) was just published by University of Chicago Press. It explores how historians in academia separated themselves from other areas of history work.