Anja Silvia Goeing

• Region: Europe
• Time Periods: 15th to 18th century; 20th-21st century
• Themes: History of Higher Education; Information History

Anja-Silvia Goeing is an associate in history, as well as a program coordinator at Harvard University. She works closely with Professor Ann Blair to organize early modern and book history groups and websites at Harvard University and is also part of a US-based group of scholars in the emerging field of information history. Since 2024, she has served as track director for 'Bodies, Nature, Knowledge' at the Sixteenth Century Society. From Feb 26, 2019 to Feb 25, 2025, she was also a "Titularprofessor" (the equivalent of a research professor without teaching appointment) at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Her book Storing, Archiving, Organizing: The Changing Dynamics of Scholarly Information Management in Post-Reformation Zurich was published in December 2016 as part of Brill’s series Library of the Written Word. Anja’s research also includes studies on fifteenth-century biographies of the Italian humanist Vittorino da Feltre (1999; 2014). She has co-edited two volumes on late medieval and early modern textbooks and collectors’ knowledge (2008; 2013), and with Ann Blair, edited the Festschrift for Anthony Grafton, For the Sake of Learning (2016). Most recently, she co-edited Information: A Historical Companion (2021) with Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, and Anthony Grafton, published by Princeton University Press, and its revised edition, Information: A Short History (September 2024). She serves on the scientific board of the series "Knowledge and Its Histories" at Firenze University Press.

Anja has played a crucial role in facilitating academic exchanges. In Fall 2023, she co-founded together with Yuval Givon and Philipp Schmid the Global Information History Workshop This monthly online working group includes faculty and graduate student members from the University of Zurich, Basel, Munich, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Harvard, Durham, Hamburg, and Central European University to discuss topics related to information history in the early modern world—broadly defined. In 2022, she also organized an international graduate course on information history in Zurich that brought together graduate students and faculty from Zurich with participants from the USA and Europe. Additionally, in 2019, she successfully organized a graduate course between Zurich and Harvard, bringing doctoral students from Zurich to Harvard. These programs are part of her broader effort to foster academic partnerships between the institutions, using her unique position at Harvard to facilitate collaboration and scholarly exchange.

In June 2018, she began two additional projects: Exams, Disputes and Dissertations: The Making of Medical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, supported by a Milton Grant, and The Funding of Higher Education: Different Objectives in Switzerland, the UK, and the USA, in collaboration with the University of Zurich and The Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar. These projects have generated new networks, web presentations, and publications, including a special issue on Daniel Sennert’s work (Early Science and Medicine vol. 30 [2025], double issue 4-5).

Anja’s recent projects are deeply connected to her role at the University of Zurich. In 2025, she contributed to the 500-year anniversary of the Schola Tigurina, publishing in the commemorative volume and in Zwingliana, presenting at the REFORC conference in Vienna, and lecturing in the interdisciplinary series at the University of Zurich. She is also under contract with Reaktion Press to write a book on Conrad Gessner, the 16th-century natural scientist and physician who taught in Zurich.

As a scholar of history of education, Anja specializes in the history of universities, natural and medical sciences, and global information history, with a focus on the Swiss, Italian, and Holy Roman Empire contexts. Her interdisciplinary courses in Zurich, such as her well-attended 2022 summer course on information history, have attracted international faculty and students. She also engages in doctoral mentoring and external evaluations.