[5] After a brief period teaching at Cornell's history department, he was appointed to a position at Princeton University in 1975, where he has subsequently remained.

Anthony Grafton is noted for his studies of the classical tradition from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, and in the history of historical scholarship.

In 1996, he delivered the Triennial E. A. Lowe Lectures at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, speaking on Ancient History in Early Modern Europe.

[7] He also penned several essay collections, including Defenders of the Text (1991), which deals with the relations between scholarship and science in the early modern period, and, most recently, Worlds Made by Words.

His most original and accessible book is The Footnote: A Curious History (1997; originally published in German in 1995 as Die tragischen Ursprünge der deutschen Fußnote), a case study of how the marginal footnote developed as a central and powerful tool in the hands of historians.