Flora Cassen

Flora Cassen was born and grew up in Antwerp, Belgium. She went to college in Brussels and studied law and history at the Free University of Brussels. She moved to New York in 2000 to continue her studies at NYU, earning a PhD in Jewish History in 2008. She has taught European and Jewish history at the University of Vermont, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and now at Washington University in Saint Louis, where she is also the Chair of the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies.
Her book Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy: Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. It tells the history of the yellow badges or hats that Jews were forced to wear in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Her book offers a reflection on the power of discriminatory signs and explains where Renaissance anti-Judaism came from and what it meant to Italian Jews and Christians. She has published articles in flagship academic journals such as the Journal of Early Modern History, the Jewish Quarterly Review, the Association for Jewish Studies Review, and in collections of essays. Her articles together with the book form a body of work that explores diverse facets of early Modern Jewish life (ranging all the way from anti-Judaism and dress to travel, spying, and food) in Italy and the Spanish Empire. In addition to her academic work, she has been writing columns for broad public audiences on the subject European antisemitism.