Christian B. Flow

Christian Flow studied classics at Harvard University (2006–2010) before entering the doctoral program in history at Princeton University, where he has focused on early modern scholarship and the history of science. He has been a visiting student (DAAD stipendiary) at the Humboldt University and spent several semesters pursuing Latin study in Rome and archival work in Germany and Switzerland. Christian’s dissertation concerns the history of Latin lexicography since the sixteenth century and traces how conceptions about the durability and obsolescence of scholarly conclusions have developed from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. Research interests include the development of practices central to philological study, the links between philological and natural-scientific inquiry, humanism and its reception, the history of pedagogy in the classics, and the history of the university. He has written on how the history of Latin lexicography might be amenable to questions and approaches developed by historians of science, and is developing articles on American Latinists studying in Munich in the late nineteenth century and on different modes of “philological observation.” He is also part of a team working to curate digitally annotations left by the colonial Winthrop family in their books, now dispersed among various repositories in the eastern United States.