W&L Presents Professor Steven Kruger Lecturing on “A Convert’s History”
Steven F. Kruger, professor at Queens College in The Graduate Center at the College of New York, will lecture at Washington and Lee University on Monday, March 9, at 7 p.m. in the Multipurpose Room, Hillel House.
The title of Kruger’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is “A Convert’s History: Paul of Burgos (ca. 1351-1435) Writes the Events of His Life.”
The talk will consider the ways in which one prominent Iberian convert to Christianity, Paul of Burgos, represents the history of Jewish-Christian relations in Spain during the period before and immediately after his own conversion.
“We might think of Paul’s writing about the Jewish and Christian communities to which he has belonged as a particular demonstration of how the personal is political, and the political personal,” said Kruger.
Kruger is the author of “The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe” (2006), “AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science” (1996) and “Dreaming in the Middle Ages” (1992).
His current projects include a study of Jewish converts to Christianity who become, after conversion, prominent spokesmen for Christian orthodoxy. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University.
The lecture is supported by the University Lectures Fund, the Washington and Lee Hillel, the Religion Department, the Phillip Howerton Fund, the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program and the Max and Sylvia Weinstein Memorial Fund.
