Pitt Humanities Center to Feature Lecture by Princeton University Professor Nov. 3

PITTSBURGH—The University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center and Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program will present a lecture by Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. The lecture, titled “How Jesus Celebrated Passover: Renaissance Scholarship and the Jewish Origins of Christianity,” will take place at 5 p.m. Nov. 3 in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 650 Schenley Dr., Oakland. A reception will follow the lecture from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in the Frick Fine Arts Cloister.

The free public lecture will focus on perceptions of Jesus as part of the Jewish world.

Grafton is an expert in renaissances, reformations, and historiography, with a special interest in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe. He has written extensively on forgeries and the use of footnotes, the history of books and book readership, and Renaissance magic, among other subjects. Grafton’s recent publications include Codex in Crisis (The Crumpled Press, 2008) and Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Harvard University Press, 2009). He is also a contributing writer for The New Republic and The New York Review of Books.

Grafton is the chair of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1975. The recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award, Grafton recently was elected president of the American Historical Association for 2011.

A discussion of Grafton’s review in The New Republic of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in The American University (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) will take place at 12:30 p.m. Nov. 4, 602 Cathedral of Learning, 4200 Fifth Ave., Oakland.

The Nov. 3 lecture is cosponsored by Pitt’s University Honors College, European Union Center of Excellence and European Studies Center, and Jewish Studies Program, among others. For more information on the lecture or the discussion, visit www.medren.pitt.edu.

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