PRS 2011 Keynote Speakers:

Anthony Grafton
Henry Putnam University Professor of History and President of the American Historical Association

Nowadays everyone knows that Jesus and most of his original followers were Jews, and many Christians find it natural to think that they followed Jewish law and performed Jewish rituals. In the later middle ages, many Christians believed that Jesus had founded the church they still belonged to, and had lived his life as a Christian. But in the Renaissance, Christian scholars began to learn Hebrew and other Semitic languages, to study Jewish sources, and to learn about Jewish rituals. Soon they began to see Jesus and his followers as Jews. In this lecture I show how difficult it was to think about the origins of Christianity in this new way, and why--and ask why Christian scholars made this extraordinary effort.

Rena Lederman
Professor of Anthropology

I've been pondering Princeton Research Symposium's catch phrase, "communicating our research to a broader audience", and aim to take it seriously in these remarks. The talk sessions to follow are meant to offer presentations that enact that charge diversely, extending the idioms of particular fields in ways that invite non-specialists in. In contrast, the goal of my opening remarks is what anthropologists like myself like to call "reflexivity": my aim is to seize this opportunity to step back and reflect on PRS's general goal. I'll do so from the point of view of my own area of specialist knowledge, sociocultural anthropology, which takes an unusual approach to the whole idea of expertise and specialization. Making that point, I will offer examples of the public uses of expert knowledge, including a very recent instance of my own.