scholars

Visiting Scholars

Susanna Elm is Professor of History and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Elm’s primary research interests are the Later Roman Empire and its transformation into a Christian Empire. She has also published on the relation between religion and contemporary and ancient medicine. In addition to numerous articles and edited volumes, Professor Elm is the author of ‘Virgins of God.’ The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford Classical Monograph Series. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994; Paperback, 1996, re-ed. 1999, 2003). Her book Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Gregory of Nazianzus, Emperor Julian, and the Christianization of the Late Roman Elites is in preparation, and her next major project will be on the role of slavery and tattoos in the formation of Christianity.

Carlos Eire, Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the history of popular piety, and the history of death. His publications include War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (1986) From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (1995); and the co-authored volume, Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997). Eire’s autobiographical work, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003), won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in 2003. He is currently researching attitudes toward miracles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

David Nirenberg is Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His highly acclaimed book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), examines the complex interfaith relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in late medieval Spain and southern France. His book The Figure of the Jew: from Ancient Egypt to the Present (provisional title) is forthcoming, and he is currently working on a study of the collapse of religious pluralism and the emergence of genealogical models of religious identity in Iberia from 1300 to 1500.

David Ruderman, Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History and the Ella Darivoff Director of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His many publications include Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth-Century Jewish Physician (1988), Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Yale1995; revised paperback, Detroit, 2001), Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key (Princeton, 2000), and Connecting the Covenant: Judaism and the Search for Christian Identity in Eighteenth-Century England, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Peter Brown, Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University. Professor Brown’s primary interests are the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the rise of Christianity. He has published extensively on these subjects including Augustine of Hippo (1967, 2000), The World of Late Antiquity (1971), The Cult of the Saints (1982), The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (1992), Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World (1995), The Rise of Western Christendom (1996, 2003), and Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002). He is currently writing a book examining attitudes toward wealth in the later Roman Empire.

Susannah Heschel holds the Eli Black Chair in Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College. Her scholarship focuses on Jewish-Christian relations in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, and her numerous publications include Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (University of Chicago Press), which won a National Jewish Book Award, and a forthcoming book, The Aryan Jesus: Christians, Nazis and the Bible (Princeton University Press). Prof. Heschel has served on the academic advisory committee of the Research Center of the U.S. Holocaust Museum. In 1992 she spoke on Judaism and the environment at the 1992 UN Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, and in 1994 at the UN conference on Population and Development, in Cairo.

John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and former director of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute (1986-1998), is a historian of religious and intellectual life in the European Middle Ages. Professor Van Engen has focused on 12th century church reform movements and on late medieval mysticism and devotional practices. His books and essays have dealt with monasticism, women’s writing, schools and universities, inquisition, canon law, notions of reform, and medieval religious culture generally. Many of his important articles have been re-published in Religion in the History of the Medieval West (2004). His most recent book, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages is forthcoming (October 2008).

Lamin Sanneh is D. Willis James Professor of Missions & World Christianity and Professor of History at the Yale University School of Divinity. He has published broadly in such diverse fields as the study of race, interfaith relations, and secularism. His many publications include Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa (1996) Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in 'Secular' Britain (with Lesslie Newbigin & Jenny Taylor, 1998), Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (2000), and most recently, Disciples of All Nations. Pillars of World Christianity (2008).

Phyllis Mack is Professor of History at Rutgers University and a member of the core faculty of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on European and women's history and history of religion, and she is interested in 17th-18th century popular religion and gender in England and America. Her publications include Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England, which won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize in 1993; the co-edited volume, In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the 20th Century; and most recently, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (2008).

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at University of Notre Dame. He is interested in race, religion, and politics as intersecting and at times intertwined modes of discourse. His publications include The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind(1994), America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002), and The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006). Professor Noll’s current projects are a short book on race, religion, and American politics and a more extensive study of the Bible in North American public life.

Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. His many books include Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, Vol. 2 (1994) Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (2001) Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (2002), and Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea, withMegan Williams (2006). Professor Grafton’s current project is a large-scale study of the science of chronology in 16th- and 17th-century Europe: how scholars attempted to assign dates to past events, reconstruct ancient calendars, and reconcile the Bible with competing accounts of the past.

Kenneth Mills is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto. A specialist in the history of colonial Latin America and the early modern Spanish world, his work focuses on religious change and the proliferation of local Christianities in Spanish South America. His publications include An Evil Lost to View? (1994) and Idolatry and Its Enemies: Extirpation and Colonial Andean Religion, 1640-1750 (1997). With Anthony Grafton he has co-edited the collections Conversion:Old Worlds and New and Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing (both 2003). Professor Mills is currently writing a book around the transatlantic journey of a Castilian image-maker and alms-gatherer, Diego de Ocana (c. 1570-1608).