David Nirenberg is the10th Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
Prior to his appointment at IAS, he 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).
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.
His books include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996), Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011), Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), and Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015), His most recent book, Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (2021), was written in collaboration with Ricardo Nirenberg (David's father and a mathematician). He is currently writing a history of race and religion, from the neolithic to the present.
David Nirenberg has been invited by the Assembly of the Collège de France, on the proposal of Professor Patrick Boucheron, History of Powers in Western Europe, 13th to 16th Centuries Chair.