The title “Books, Digits and Dollars: A Design for the Future” may not make much sense for the Eugene Lunn history lecture, until you know the lecturer is a book historian.

He is Harvard’s Robert Darnton, scheduled to deliver the Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture on Wednesday (May 2). The lecture is free and open to the public.

The Department of History lecture series honors a 20-year faculty member who distinguished himself as a scholar in the field of modern European intellectual history.

Professor Darnton, whose academic field is modern Europe, is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard University Library. His awards include a MacArthur Fellowship (commonly known as a genius grant), awarded in 1992.

In addition to helping create the fields of “new cultural history” and “history of the book,” Darnton has recently been at the forefront of discussing books and related information technologies in the digital age, according to Professor Michael Saler, who is organizing this year’s Lunn lecture.

Darnton’s books include The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future; The Great Cat-Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History; The Literary Underground of the Old Regime; Poetry and Police: Communications Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris; and The Business of Enlightenment.

His lecture here is scheduled to take place in the AGR Room at the Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center, starting at 7:30 p.m., with a reception to follow.

Saler noted a generous donation in support of the lecture series —a donation from alumnus Michael Tennefoss, who found Lunn to be inspirational. Tennefoss graduated in 1980 with Bachelor of Arts in economics and political science.

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