Department of History

The History Workshop at the University of Florida presents Nina Caputo with a work-in-progress chapter on Europe’s high middle ages.

The event will feature three distinguished discussants, specialists all in religious practices and conversion, and across three continents, including:

• Deeana Klepper, professor of religion & history, Boston University
• Benjamin Soares, professor of religion, University of Florida
• Kenneth Mills, professor of history, University of Michigan

Speaker Information:

Nina Caputo is a scholar of Jewish history and interfaith relations in medieval Europe. She is the author of Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, Messianism

(2007); and Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, A Graphic History (Oxford 2017), illustrated by Liz Clarke. She also co-edited Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity

(Cornell, 2014) and, with Mitchell B. Hart, On the Word of a Jew. Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust (Indiana, 2019). Her PhD is from the University of California, Berkeley.

Panelists Information:

Deeana Klepper’s research focuses on medieval identities and interreligious encounters. The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Texts in the Later Middle Ages (U of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) explores Christian scholars’ contradictory attitudes toward Jewish tradition. Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany: Albert of Diessen’s “Mirror of Priests” (Cornell U Press, forthcoming) uses a 14th century Latin manual for German priests to explore the repurposing of “universal” religious ideals and laws to craft distinctive expressions of Christianity.

Benjamin Soares is an anthropologist of Islam and religious life since the early 20th century in Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, and among West African Muslims in Europe and Asia. His recent work on “lived Islam” features changing modalities of religious expression and belonging, emergent social imaginaries, public intellectuals, religious mediations and the public sphere. His books include Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (Edinburgh, 2005); and numerous edited volumes, such as Muslim Youth and the 9/11 Generation (U of New Mexico Press|SAR Press, 2016); and with R. Hackett, New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa (Bloomington, 2015).

Kenneth Mills investigates religious transformations in early modern Iberian and colonial Latin American worlds, often through “idiosyncratically and fragmentarily reported episodes.” His trans-oceanic vision is vivid in Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, ed. with E. Levy (U of Texas Press, 2013). An anthropological historian, Mills has long theorized conversion, including in two books with Anthony Grafton: Conversion: Old Worlds and New (2003) and Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Modern Ages: Seeing and Believing (2003). His career began with colonial Andean religious practices and Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640-1750 (Princeton U Press, 1997). After many years at the University of Toronto, he joined Michigan as the J. Frederick Hoffman Professor of History a few years ago.