Nirenberg, David, 1964-

David Nirenberg is an American medievalist and intellectual historian. He is the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, 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 the Committee on Social Thought, as well as the former Executive Vice Provost of the University, Dean of the Social Sciences Division, and the founding Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. He is 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. He is notable for his landmark analysis in 2013 of antijudaism as a constitutive principle of the Western tradition, and his argument for a longue durée approach to historical understanding, a career about-face from the methodological approach taken in his 1996 work, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. He has a particular interest in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought in medieval Europe. In 2024, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.