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David Nirenberg serves as the 10th Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study since 2022. He is a historian specializing in the interactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Nirenberg received his A.B. from Yale University in 1986, followed by an M.A. in 1989 and a Ph.D. in 1992 from Princeton University's Department of History. His academic career spans multiple prestigious institutions: Assistant Professor to Associate Professor of History at Rice University from 1992 to 2000, where he also directed the Center for the Study of Cultures; Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Leonard & Helen R. Stulman Jewish Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University from 2000 to 2007; and at the University of Chicago from 2006 to 2022, holding positions including Professor, Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor, Founding Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences, Executive Vice Provost, and Interim Dean of the Divinity School. During his tenure at Chicago, he advanced interdisciplinary initiatives such as the Computational Social Science program and the Center for International Social Science Research.
Nirenberg's scholarship explores religious violence, anti-Judaism in the Western tradition, interfaith relations across medieval and modern periods, and the philosophical dimensions of number and humanity. His influential books include Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1996), which earned the John Nicholas Brown Prize (2000), Herbert Baxter Adams Prize (1999), and Premio del Rey Prize (1997) from the American Historical Association; Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W.W. Norton, 2013), recipient of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize (2014) from Phi Beta Kappa and the Historikerpreis from the city of Münster (2017); Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Medieval and Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2014), awarded the Laing Prize (2017); and Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (co-authored with Ricardo Nirenberg, University of Chicago Press, 2021). He has held fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and American Academy in Rome, and received honorary doctorates from the University of Haifa (2016) and the Leopold Lucas Prize (2024). Nirenberg is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and Medieval Academy of America.
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