Students selected Associate Professor of History Dallas Denery to give this semester’s Karofsky Faculty Encore Lecture, “honoring him as a teacher and role model,” said Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies Leah Zuo, who introduced Denery’s Jan. 30 Common Hour talk. Denery spoke about how we learned to live with lies.

Denery specializes in medieval and early modern Europe. His most recent book, The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment, was published by Princeton University Press.

The Chronicle of Higher Education called Denery’s book an “excellent new history of Western thinking on deception,” marveling at a statistic cited by Denery that people lie three times during every 10 minutes of conversation. “It’s a funny thing about lying: We all do it, and we all damn it,” the magazine muses. Politico also gave a nod to Denery’s book.