Lecture Series: David Kertzer—The Pope at War

David Kertzer—The Pope at War

Information from the newly opened Vatican archives, a groundbreaking, explosive, and riveting book about Pope Pius XII and his actions during World War II, including how he responded to the Holocaust.

Pulitzer-Prize-winning author David Kertzer is the Paul Dupee University Professor of Social Science at Brown University. He is an authority on Italian politics, society, and history; political symbolism; and anthropological demography. Past president of both the Social Science History Association and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, he is co-founder and served for many years as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. In 2005 Kertzer was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2006 to 2011, he was the Provost of Brown University. A play based on The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, by playwright Alfred Uhry, was performed at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2006. In April 2016, Steven Spielberg announced that he would be making a film based on Kertzer’s book, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner.