David Nirenberg
Committee on Social Thought
Phone: (773) 702-3423
Email: nirenberg@uchicago.edu
Professor, Committee on Social Thought, History, and in the College
Education:
1987-1992: Princeton University, Dept. of History, MA (1989), PhD (1992).
1982-1986: Yale University, AB (1986).
What are your feelings toward interdisciplinary study, the benefits and draw backs:
Interdisciplinarity has been hailed by some as the antidote to hyper-specialization, cursed by others as the bane of expertise and Wissenschaft. To my Galenic mind it is neither cure nor poison, but a drug whose effects can be deleterious or healing, depending on the state of the body upon which it acts. By "body" here I suppose I mean two things. One is the nature of the problem being explored, the other is the sensibility of the scholar. There are undoubtedly questions that can be brightly illuminated through a cyclopian optic, and others that require more eyes than a hydra. There are also scholars who prefer to do one thing very well, and those who prefer to be skilled in all ways of contending. There is no shame in either: Achilles and Odysseus were both heroes, fox and hedgehog both have their charms. The trick, it seems to me, is being aware both of the nature of one's questions and of one's own sensibilities, and reconciling the two. My own prejudice is for a disciplined inter-disciplinarity, one that feels comfortable in a disciplinary home, but takes frequent trips away in order to return transformed. This seems to me particularly important in Jewish Studies. On the one hand, as an institutional subject Jewish Studies was born in the 1970s already interdisciplinary and interdepartmental. Moreover its object of study is often intercultural, multi-lingual, trans-national. Yet unlike some other "cultural studies," it generally recognizes an ongoing need for a high degree of technical and linguistic competences. Perhaps it is this disciplined interdisciplinarity, this simultaneous emphasis on the particular and the universal, that makes Jewish Studies so congenial to me.
What types of classes will you be offering:
My interests are oriented around two basic questions. The first has to do with the ways in which particular cultures have imagined the difficulties of communication and hence the limits of community. The second involves the co-production (or co-dependence?) of religious cultures, by which I mean the ways in which the many historical Judaisms, Christianities, and Islams have each used the others in order to create and define themselves, and how those uses have in turn transformed the meanings and possibilities (and therefore on occasion also the conditions of existence) for the others. Both interests have produced the courses I will be teaching in 2007-8, all of which are in some way related to Jewish Studies, and I imagine the same will be true in years to come. An example of a course related to the first general interest would be the seminar I am teaching on Shakespeare's economics, which is largely about Shakespeare's use of Jews and Judaism in his explorations of the dangers inherent in symbolic economies and spheres of circulation. An example from the second interest would be the course I will be teaching for undergraduates on Islamic thinking about Judaism; or the graduate course on the biological models of religious identity that emerged among Christians, Jews, and converts in late medieval Spain between the mass conversions of 1391 and the expulsions of 1492.
What type of students would benefit working with you:
I find it very hard to predict what type of student would benefit from working with me, just as, when I was a student, I found it hard to predict whom I would most learn from. Indeed in retrospect, some of what I now value most I cared for least when I first encountered it. So I'll make no prognostications. What I do know is that I have benefited from working with every student I have had. I can only hope that the feeling was in some way reciprocal.
Publications:
Books
- 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.
- The Figure of the Jew: from Ancient Egypt to the Present (provisional title). Forthcoming, W.W. Norton (New York, 2006).
- Wie jüdisch war das Spanien des Mittelalters? Die Perspektive der Literatur, Kleine Schriften
Articles
- "Medieval critiques of ministerial power: the Privado as Jewish concubine," forthcoming, Jewish History.
- "When a society destroys its 'other': Spain, 1391-1492," forthcoming in French, Annales: HSS.
- "How Jewish was Medieval Spain? The Case of Poetry," in press, Speculum April 2006.
- "Christian Sovereignty and Jewish Flesh," in press, in The Medieval Senses, ed. S. Nichols, J. Küpper, et al.
- "'Race' and 'Racism' in Late Medieval Spain," in press, in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. W. Mignolo, M. Quilligan, and M. Greer, University of Chicago Press.
- "Engaging 'Order and Exclusion': Reflections on a recent book by Dominique Iogna-Prat," in press, Early Medieval Europe.
- "Poetics and Politics in an Age of Mass Conversion," in press, Groeningen Studies in Cultural Change.
- "Kings and Jews in Christendom," in press, in Königtum in Europa, ed. B. Jussen (C.H. Beck).
- "A Brief history of Jewish Enmity," in press, in The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, ed. M. Kupfer (Penn State University Press).