Department of History

Sara Lipton

Associate Professor (Ph.D., Yale University, 1991)

Research Interests

My work focuses on religious identity and experience, Jewish-Christian relations, and art and culture in the high Middle Ages (11th-14th centuries). I am currently working on two projects. The first, to be published by Metropolitan Books in 2009, examines how changing concepts of vision and witness in medieval Christian society intersected with the visual representation of the Jew. The second, entitled Art, Preaching, and Piety in the High Middle Ages (1150-1300) seeks to understand why and to what effect Christendom invested so much in worshiping the ineffable Word through the material thing.

Publications

“Images and their Uses,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity: Christianity in Western Europe c. 1000 - c.1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

"The Jew's Face: Vision, Knowledge, and Identity in Medieval Jewish Caricature," in Late Medieval Jewish Identities, ed. Esperanza Alfonso and Carmen Caballero-Navas (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

"Where are the Gothic Jewish Women? On the Non-Iconography of the Jewess in the Cantigas de Santa Maria," Jewish History 22 (2008).

“The Sweet Lean of His Head: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80:4 (2005), 1172-1208.

Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). (Winner, John Nicholas Brown Prize for Best First Book; Finalist, Koret Jewish History Book Prize)

E-Mail

sara.lipton@sunysb.edu

Office

SBS N-301

Phone

631-632-7501

Fax

631-632-7367