Baldwin is the author of nine books, including Athena Unbound: Why and How Academic Knowledge Should Be Free for All (MIT Press, 2023); Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History (MIT Press, 2021); Fighting the First Wave: Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently across the Globe (Cambridge University Press, 2021); and Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 1999). His essays and interviews on contemporary issues have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and Der Spiegel, among others. He is a recipient of a New Investigator Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and past fellow or grantee of the Center for American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, the National Institutes of Health, the Humboldt Foundation, and DAAD, among others. Baldwin is also an impactful philanthropist through the Arcadia Fund, which he co-founded with his wife, Lisbet Rausing, in 2001. Arcadia has given more than $1 billion in grants to nonprofit and scholarly institutions around the world that preserve cultural heritage and promote open access.
Peter Baldwin’s fields of inquiry into history, science, and politics have led him to projects across the social spectrum, from academia and publishing to journalism and philanthropy. The Peter Baldwin Archives offers an opportunity to trace the historian’s path of knowledge: how challenges in the modern world inspired the author to look for historical precedent; how the professor’s courses on modern Europe and Cold War–history have evolved since the fall of the Berlin Wall; how open-access archives have developed into a decades-long passion for the philanthropist; and a look at the essays and source materials that have in turn inspired Baldwin himself.
