SARA LIPTON
ProfessorDepartment Chair |
PhD, Yale University, 1991 |
Office: Social & Behavioral Sciences - Level 3, Room N-301 |
Read Dr. Sara Lipton's CV |
Interests: Medieval Europe, Jewish history, religion, gender
Bio:
My work focuses on religious identity and experience, Jewish-Christian relations, and art and culture in the high and later Middle Ages (11th–15th centuries). I am interested in the relationship between formal knowledge and lived experience, particularly as manifested in the interplay of text and image, and as mediated through the figure of the Jew. I recently completed a book called Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Iconography (Metropolitan Books, 2014). Dark Mirror examines how changes in Christian devotion, thought, and politics affected the visual representation of the Jew. It explains the emergence of the iconographically identifiable Jew around the year 1080 and brings theoretical coherence to the dizzying proliferation of images of Jews in subsequent centuries. My current project, "The Vulgate of Experience: Art and Preaching in the High Middle Ages (1180–1300)," explores why and to what effect Christendom invested so much in worshiping the ineffable Word through the material thing.
Recent Courses:
Graduate
HIS 601 History of the Emotions
Select Works:
"Jews, Money, Myth: A Review," The New York Review of Books. Read the article.
"Trumps' Meddlesome Priest," The New York Times. Read the article.
"Unfeigned Witness: Jews, Matter, and Vision in Twelfth-century Christian Art" in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialsm. Learn more.
"Isaac and Antichrist in the Archives," Past & Present. Read the article.
"The Invention of the Jewish Nose," The New York Review of Books. Read the article.
"Those Manly Men of Yore," The New York Times. Read the article.
"Those Who Act More Strictly," in Political Ritual and Practice in Capetian France. Read the book chapter.
"The Jewish Authenticity Trap," The New York Review of Books. Read the article.