Pamela O. Long is an independent historian and the author of many books, including Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome and Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. She was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.