David Nirenberg
Professor of Social Thought and in the College
I am by discipline a historian. Much of my work has focused on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by inter-relating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France, in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In more recent projects, like Wie jüdisch war das Spanien des Mittelalters? Die Perspektive der Literatur and “Figures of Thought and Figures of Flesh: ‘Jews’ and ‘Judaism’ in Late Medieval Spanish Poetry and Politics,” I have taken a less anthropological and more hermeneutical approach, exploring the work that “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” do as figures in each other’s thought about the nature of language and the world.I have been pursuing this approach in two book projects, one focused on the transformation of religious identities in Spain between the mass conversions of 1391 and the establishment of the Inquisition, the other on the functions of Jews and Judaism as figures of thought, from ancient Egypt to the present.
Although often focused on these three specific religious traditions, at its most general my interest seems to be in the history of how the possibilities and limits of community and communication have been imagined. In order to explore these more general questions I am also engaged in two long term thematic projects: the first a history of love’s central place in a number of ancient, medieval, and modern idealizations of communication and exchange; and the second a parallel study of poison as a representation of communication’s dangers.
Education
- 1987-1992: Princeton University, Dept. of History, MA (1989), PhD (1992).
- 1982-1986: Yale University, AB (1986).
Selected Publications
- Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press (1996). Paperback edition, February, 1998. Spanish translation: Comunidades de Violencia: Persecución de minorías en la edad media, Peninsula Editorial (2001); French translation: Violence et minorités au Moyen Age, Presses Universitaires de France (2001). Received John Nicholas Brown Prize, Medieval Academy of America, 2000; Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, American Historical Association, 1999; First Book Prize, the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Studies, 1998; Premio del Rey Prize, American Historical Association, 1997.
- Wie jüdisch war das Spanien des Mittelalters? Die Perspektive der Literatur, Kleine Schriften des Arye Maimon-Instituts, vol. 7 (Trier, 2005).
- The Figure of the Jew: from Ancient Egypt to the Present [provisional title]. Forthcoming, W.W. Norton (New York, 2007).
