Peter Baldwin (professor)


Peter Baldwin is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles and a philanthropist. He was educated at Harvard and Yale. He has written several books about Europe.

Career

A study of the state of trans-Atlantic relations between the United States and Europe from Oxford University Press was published in late 2009, entitled The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike. In 2014 he published The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle.

Philanthropy

Baldwin co-founded the Arcadia Fund in 2001 with his wife Lisbet Rausing. As of March 2020, the Fund has made grant commitments of over $678 million to charities and scholarly institutions globally that preserve cultural heritage and the environment and promote open access. Arcadia-funded projects include the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme at SOAS, the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library and Fauna & Flora International's Halcyon Land and Sea fund. They are listed as one of the biggest benefactors to the Wikimedia Foundation and donated $5 million to the Wikimedia endowment in 2017 after Baldwin joined its advisory board.
Rausing and Baldwin also founded Lund Trust. Since 2002 Lund Trust has given more than $66.6 million to charities in the UK and internationally.

Publications