David Nirenberg & Avinoam Shalem – On Ghettoes: Medieval, Modern, and Metaphorical

Conversations/Conversazioni
The City

David Nirenberg & Avinoam Shalem – On Ghettoes: Medieval, Modern, and Metaphorical

Color photograph of Campo di Ghetto Nuovo in Venice, featuring an open plaza with people and dogwalkers in the foreground, and six and seven story residential buildings in the background, each painted in shades of red, tan, and yellow

View of Campo di Ghetto Nuovo in Venice in 2009 (photograph by h_laca and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license)

The first Conversations/Conversazioni of the calendar year will feature David Nirenberg (2021 Resident), the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is also dean of the Divinity School, and AAR Director Avinoam Shalem (2016 Resident).

“Ghetto” emerged as a word to describe a specific late-medieval phenomenon: the creation in Christian cities of segregated and walled neighborhoods in which Jews were required to live. Today its meanings are vaster, and it serves as a metaphor for many different types of containment and segregation. How did these urban spaces emerge? Why did they prove so useful as marginal spaces and a metaphor? And what work do the phenomenon and the metaphor do today?

This conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Date & time
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
6:00 PM
Location
AAR Zoom
Central European Time
Rome, Italy