Department of History

Robert Burr Litchfield (R. Burr Litchfield), Professor of History Emeritus, is specialized in Early Modern European, Italian, and Florentine history. He taught at Dartmouth College (1963-68), where he also learned basics of computer analysis, and at Brown University (1968-2002).

He has published, Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530-1790 (Princeton, 1986—AHA Howard R. Marraro Prize, 1987), and articles on European and Florentine history. He has also published translations of Franco Venturi, Settecento Riformatore (3 vols., Princeton, 1989-90); Emilio Sereni, History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape (Princeton, 1997); and Sergio Bertelli, The King's Body (Penn State, 2001). He co-edited a census database for 19th century comparative urban history (Comparative Cities, Ann Arbor Michigan: ICPSR, 1985) and two Web sites of sources for Florentine History: The Online Catasto of 1427 (1995) and The Online Tratte of Office Holders 1282-1532 (2000), and another Web site, The Online Gazetteer of Sixteenth Century Florence (2006), for use with his book, Florence Ducal Capital, 1530-1630, published as a state-of-the-art online book by ACLS Humanities E-book in 2008. He is currently working on Portuguese and Spanish nobles at the Medici court in the 16th-17th centuries, and Florentine commercial relations through Livorno, Portugal, and Spain with the Atlantic World.

He travels frequently to Italy, and lives with his partner Gardner Chace in Westport, Massachusetts.