Each semester the Italian Academy invites prominent Columbia University professors to open one of their regularly scheduled classes to the public, bringing students and the community together in the Academy building. This fall the Academy welcomes professors from the departments of Art History, History and Music.
Neslihan Şenocak received her PhD at Bilkent University, Turkey and since 2007 is an Assistant Professor in Medieval History at Columbia. She is interested in medieval religious, intellectual and social history, and in particular the Franciscan Order, the rise of scholastic education, the history of criminal justice and the social and legal history of the medieval Italian communes. She has published several articles on the Franciscan libraries, contributed to edited books and is the author of The Poor and the Perfect: the Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order 1209-1310 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 2012). At present, she is working on her second monograph titled “Clerical Education, Pastoral Care and Sanctification of Learning in the Middle Ages”.