Bio-bibliography

USA

David Nirenberg

2026 Balzan Prize for Jewish Studies

For his groundbreaking scholarship and contributions on Judaism, anti-Judaism, and the dynamics of the relationship between Jews, Christians, and Muslims; for his meticulous research, theoretical insights on the fundamental interdependence of violence and tolerance, rigorous historical analyses, and command of a wide range of sources in multiple languages and spanning multiple disciplines; for profoundly advancing our understanding of not only ancient, but also contemporary questions.<br /> <br />

David Nirenberg is an American medievalist and intellectual historian born in New York City on 28 September 1964.

He is the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Director | Institute for Advanced Study, NJ. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Divinity School, and Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought. He was also appointed to the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies.

David Nirenberg earned his AB from Yale, where John Boswell introduced him to the study of minorities in Medieval Aragon. He holds a PhD from Princeton, where he studied under Peter Brown, Natalie Zemon Davis, and William Chester Jordan. He has held visiting professorships at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, and the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. He is an Associate of Germany’s Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

At the University of Chicago he served as Founding Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society from 2011-2014. Between 2014 and 2017 he served as Dean of the University’s Division of Social Sciences. In 2017 he became Executive Vice Provost, and in 2018 he additionally took on the role of Interim Dean of the Divinity School, stepping down from the Provost’s office a year later. He became Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2022.

Among his most important books:

The Power of History and the Place of the Historian in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Mohr-Seibeck (forthcoming).

Rassendenken und Religion im Mittelalter: Über Ideen zur somatischen Reproduktion von Ähnlichkeit und Differenz. Wallstein Verlag (2023).

Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. With Ricardo Nirenberg. University of Chicago Press (2021). Chinese and Korean translations.

Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics, 2012 Mandel Lectures, Brandeis University Press (2015).

Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Medieval and Modern, University of Chicago Press (Oct., 2014). Spanish translation Religiones vecinas: Cristianismo, Islam, y Judaismo en la Edad Media y en la actualidad, Critica (2016). Received Laing Prize, 2017.

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, W.W. Norton (2013). Published in Great Britain as Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking, Head of Zeus (2013, 2018). German translation Anti-Judaismus. Eine andere Geschichte des westlichen Denkens, C.H. Beck/Gerda Henkel Stiftung (2015); Italian translation Antigiudaismo: la tradizione occidentale, Viella (2016); Hungarian translation Antijudaizmus – A nyugati hagyomány, Pesti Kalligram pft. (2016); French translation Antijudaïsme: Un pilier de la pensée occidentale, Labor et Fides (2023). Received Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Phi Beta Kappa, 2014; Historikerpreis der Stadt Münster, 2017.

„Jüdisch“ als Politisches Konzept, in the series Historische Geisteswissenschaften Frankfurter Vorträge, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen (October 2013). Italian translation: Ebraico. un concetto politico. Una critica della teologia politica, Collana di filosofia, GoWare E-Book (February 2015).

Wie jüdisch war das Spanien des Mittelalters? Die Perspektive der Literatur, Kleine Schriften des Arye Maimon-Instituts, vol. 7 (Trier, 2005).

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.