Arnoud Visser is Professor of Textual Culture in the Renaissance in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication. He is director of the Huizinga Institute, the Dutch national research school of cultural history.

His research focuses on early modern intellectual culture, with particular emphasis on humanism, the history of reading, and cultural perceptions –both positive and negative– of learning. He is currently completing a cultural history of the know-it-all, from Antiquity to the present, aimed at a general readership. The book explores how knowledge and learning can provoke irritation, uncovering a deep tradition of anti-intellectual resistance. He has also recently published an edited volume about the history of fame in the Renaissance, as part of a broader, diachronic project on the long-term history of fame and celebrity. In addition, he directs Annotated Books Online, a digital platform for the study of early modern reading practices, developed in collaboration with partners at Ghent, University College London, York, and Princeton.

His publications include:

• On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (forthcoming in 2025 with Princeton University Press)
• A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury Academic in 2025)
• Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500-1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: The Use of the Emblem in Late-Renaissance Humanism (Leiden: Brill, 2005)
• together with Karl Enenkel (eds.), Mundus Emblematicus: Studies in Neo-Latin Emblem Books (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003)