Edward Wallace Muir Jr. (born 1946) is a Professor of History and Italian atNorthwestern University. He is also Clarence L. Ver Steeg Professor in the Arts and Sciences and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. Known for his use of anthropological methods in historical research, he was a pioneer in the historical study ofritual andfeuding. He has been especially influential in using and interpretingmicrohistorical methods, which were first devised by historians inItaly. His work has focused onRenaissance Italy, especially theRepublic of Venice and its territories. He served as president of theAmerican Historical Association in 2023.

Muir was raised inSalt Lake City, Utah, and is the descendant of earlyMormon pioneers. His great grandfather,William Smith Muir, served in theMormon Battalion during theWar with Mexico and as a sergeant in theU.S. Army raised the first American flag overSan Diego, California. William Smith later settled inBountiful, Utah where he began to farm in 1852. His descendants used the farm in Bountiful as the nucleus for a shipping and packing business for fresh produce fromUtah,Oregon,Idaho, andNevada. Muir's father,Edward Wallace Muir Sr., was the long-serving president of the company, then known as Muir-Roberts, Co., Inc. Muir's brother,Phillip R. Muir, serves as the fifth-generation president of the company, now known asMuir Copper Canyon Farms, which is a food service provider for restaurants and institutions in Utah, Idaho, andWyoming. Muir's maternal grandfather,Samuel Morgan, was the Superintendent of Schools inDavis County, Utah. Muir's mother,Mary Margaret Muir, was an art historian who taught at theUniversity of Utah and was an expert on the noted western landscape painter,LeConte Stewart.

Muir studied History at theUniversity of Utah (BA 1969) and Modern European History atRutgers University inNew Brunswick, New Jersey (MA 1970, PhD 1975). He has taught atStockton State College inNew Jersey,Syracuse University,Louisiana State University, andNorthwestern University, where he served as department chair. He has lived and conducted research for extended periods inFlorence,Venice, andRome, Italy. He is the past president of theSixteenth Century Society and Conference (2004) and from 2012 to 2014 was president of theRenaissance Society of America.^[1] He has been elected to serve as the President of the American Historical Association in 2023.

He has held fellowships from among others theGuggenheim Foundation,^[2] theInstitute for Advanced Study inPrinceton, theNational Humanities Center, and theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences inStanford.^[3] In 2010, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from theAndrew W. Mellon Foundation, currently the largest award in the humanities.^[4][5] In 2014 he became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[6]

Throughout his career his work has rotated around two problems, the means for establishing acivil society in late medieval and Renaissance Italy, especially through ritual, and the forces ofdisorder working against civil society, especiallyvendettas. Although rooted in an analysis of thesocial structures of cities and networks of patrons and families, most of his work has engaged the interpretation of meaning through public representations, whether in civic rituals,carnival festivity, oroperas.

He is an avidskier.

• Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton University Press, 1981) (Winner of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize andHoward R. Marraro Prize in Italian History)
• Italian translation:Il rituale civico a Venezia nel Rinascimento (Rome: Il Veltro Editrice, 1984).
• The Leopold vonRanke Manuscript Collection of Syracuse University: The Complete Catalogue (Syracuse University Press, 1983).
• Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective. Co-edited withGuido Ruggiero. Selections fromQuaderni Storici, no. 1. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
• Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. Co-edited with Guido Ruggiero. Selections fromQuaderni Storici, no. 2. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
• Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 390pp. (Winner of the Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History)
• Reader's edition:Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
• Italian translation:Il sangue s’infuria e ribolle: La vendetta nell’Italia del Rinascimento. Verona: Cierre edizioni, 2010.
• History from Crime. Co-edited with Guido Ruggiero. Selections fromQuaderni Storici, no. 3. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, 236pp.
• Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997, 2nd edition, 2005).
• Italian translation:Riti e rituali nell’Europa moderna. Milan, La Nuova Italia, 2000.
• Spanish translation:Fiesta y rito en la Europa moderna. Madrid, Editorial Complutense, 2001.
• Co-author with Brian Levack, Michael Maas, and Meredith Veldman,The West: Encounters and Transformations. New York: Addison Wesley Longman (new Prentice Hall), 2004. Concise edition, 2006. 2nd full edition, 2007. 3rd full edition, 2010.
• The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance: Skeptics, Libertines, and Opera. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Italian translation:Guerre culturali: Libertinismo e religione alla fine del Rinascimento. Bari: Laterza, 2008.

• Muir's CV
• Muir's Faculty PageArchived 2015-08-06 at theWayback Machine at Northwestern's History Department
• Appearances onC-SPAN

• 21st-century American historians
• 21st-century American male writers
• Northwestern University faculty
• Rutgers University alumni
• University of Utah alumni
• 1946 births
• Living people
• Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars
• American male non-fiction writers
• Microhistorians
• Historians of Italy

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• People appearing on C-SPAN