David Nirenberg Named Johns Hopkins Distinguished Visitor

David Nirenberg, Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, has been named an inaugural Distinguished Visitor in the Arts and Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Nirenberg—one of two inaugural Visitors, alongside artist and architect Maya Lin—will participate in the program during the 2026–27 academic year.

Led by Johns Hopkins’s Office of the Arts and recommended by the university’s Taskforce on the Arts, the Distinguished Visitors in the Arts and Humanities initiative will bring leading artists and humanists to campus each year for immersive, multi-day visits. 

In their announcement, Johns Hopkins described Nirenberg as “one of the world’s leading historians of religion and ideas,” and emphasized how his work “exemplifies the power of ideas and creative practice to deepen understanding of history, memory, and the world we share.”

The announcement further highlighted Nirenberg’s “widely influential” book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W.W. Norton, 2013), stating that he “traces more than two millennia of thinking about Jews and Judaism to consider how anti-Jewish ideas became embedded in Western intellectual, philosophical, and political traditions.” 

Nirenberg’s latest publication, co-authored with his father Ricardo Nirenberg, was also praised. The book, titled Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2021), was described as bringing “mathematics into conversation with literature, philosophy, religion, and science,” offering “a searching reflection on the powers and limits of both the sciences and the humanities.” 

Distinguished Visitors such as Nirenberg will engage with the Johns Hopkins community through public lectures, seminars, panel discussions, and small-group conversations with faculty and students. The program is designed to connect the arts and humanities with disciplines across the university, including science, medicine, public health, business, and engineering, a spirit which aligns with the Institute’s mission to convene scholars across the sciences and humanities to nourish discovery.

Read more in the Johns Hopkins University announcement.