Join us for the 35th Bampton Lectures in America featuring speaker Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor emeritus of Ecclesiastical History, Cambridge University on "The Crusades, Christianity and Islam".

Oct. 9: "Crusades as Christian Holy Wars"
Oct. 10: "Crusades as Christian Penitential Wars"
Oct. 16: "Crusades and Imperialism"
Oct. 17: "Crusades and Islam"

Bio:

After education at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD, Jonathan Riley-Smith’s first university post was in the Department of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. In 1972 he returned to the Faculty of History in the University of Cambridge before being appointed Professor of History at Royal Holloway College, University of London in 1978. In 1994 he was elected Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Cambridge. He retired at the beginning of 2005.

He is the sole author of eight books, including:

The Knights of St John in Jerusalem and Cyprus
The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem
What Were the Crusades?
The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading
The Crusades: A History
The First Crusaders

He is also the co-author of one book and the editor or co-editor of another seven. He began his research career as a historian of the military orders and then moved in the late 1960s and early 1970s on to the political and constitutional history of the kingdom of Jerusalem. In the mid 1970s his interests turned to the theory of crusading and the roles of churchmen as authorizers and preachers. This led to a concern with the responses of lay men and women to crusade ideas. He has now returned to the history of the military orders, but he is also interested in the long shadow of crusading, or rather of perceptions of it, that lay across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Professor Riley-Smith, who is a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, has been privileged to train a group of outstanding young historians. They include three full professors and three others lecturing at British universities, six teaching at American universities, others with university posts in Canada, Switzerland, Denmark and Israel, and one who has a permanent research post in Cyprus.

Professor Riley-Smith is a Knight of Grace and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and a Knight of Justice of The Most Venerable Order of St John.