Roger Chartier

Roger Chartier serves as Annenberg Visiting Professor in History at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts & Sciences, Department of History, while maintaining his primary position as Professor at the Collège de France in Paris. He frequently lectures across the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, bridging transnational academic communities through his work in early modern European cultural history.

Chartier's research centers on the history of written culture, with particular focus on book history, reading practices, and educational systems from the 11th to 18th centuries. His methodology synthesizes literary criticism, bibliography, and socio-cultural history to examine how textual materiality shapes meaning production. Key interests include the relationship between literary history and written culture across France, England, and Spain, alongside broader methodological inquiries into history's intersections with philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. His approach extends the Annales School tradition while innovating through material culture analysis.

His publication trajectory reveals consistent exploration of textual transmission mechanisms - from medieval wax tablets to early modern print culture. Chartier demonstrates how writing surfaces (parchment, paper, wax) and textual organization systems fundamentally shaped cultural memory and intellectual development. Recent works increasingly analyze the tension between inscription and erasure in cultural preservation, while earlier scholarship established foundational frameworks for understanding letter-writing conventions and private life historiography.

At Penn, Chartier teaches specialized courses including Cultures of the Book, Introduction to Written Culture, and What is a Book? Though he does not supervise PhD students directly, he actively participates in doctoral committees. His academic leadership manifests through shaping methodological debates in cultural history and establishing new paradigms for analyzing textual-material relationships across disciplinary boundaries.