Edwin Augustus Grosvenor (1845 – 1936) was a historian, author, chairman of the history department at Amherst College, and longtime president of the national organization of Phi Beta Kappa societies. Grosvenor was called "one of the most cosmopolitan of Americans" by author and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Grosvenor was born in 1845 in West Newbury, MA, the son of Dr. Edwin Prescott Grosvenor and the author Harriet (Sanborn) Grosvenor. He prepared at Brown High School in Newburyport, MA, and graduated from Amherst College in 1867 as class poet and salutatorian.

After graduating, he served as a tutor at Robert College in Constantinople, Turkey. After returning to the U.S., he obtained an M. A. from Amherst College and was ordained as a minister in Newburyport, 1872. In 1872 Edwin Grosvenor returned to Robert College with his young wife and began teaching. Grosvenor then taught at Amherst College from 1892 to 1914, and was professor emeritus until his death in 1936. His two volume Constantinople was "the most important treatise . . . that has yet appeared in English,” wrote a reviewer in the Springfield Republican. “One of the books of the year.