History can help make us aware of patterns in our thinking about the world, of prejudices and habits of thought.

Credit: Andrea Kane/Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ

In a lecture on Thursday, April 20, titled “How Can History Help us? The Example of Anti-Semitism,” David Nirenberg, the director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, NJ, draws upon the long history of anti-semitism in order to ask how that history can help us understand debates about anti-semitism today. The lecture is at 5 p.m. in Malott Hall, Rm. 228 and will be live-streamed over Zoom. This lecture is free and open to the public.

Nirenberg is a historian of Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. His work explores the history of ideas, particularly medieval ideas about communication, exchange and social relations, as well as ideas of race and racism.

Prior to his appointment at IAS, Nirenberg was the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Social Thought, History, Divinity, and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, where he also served as the founding director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (2011–14), Dean of the Social Sciences (2014–17), Executive Vice Provost (2017–18), and Dean of the Divinity School (2018–22).

This lecture is sponsored by the Cornell University Program of Jewish Studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies, and Cornell Hillel with support of the Pearl and Otto Delikat Holocaust Memorial Fund.

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.