Press Releases

The Institute for Advanced Study has received a $3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support one-year fellowships for assistant professors in the Institute’s School of Historical Studies. The donation will be matched by $3 million funded from the $100 million challenge grant provided by the Simons Foundation and the Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences to initiate the Institute’s current $200 million campaign to strengthen its endowment. This will create a $6 million Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships for Assistant Professors Fund to provide a permanent endowment for fellowships to enable early career scholars to work at the Institute at a critical point in their careers.

The 19th annual Program for Women and Mathematics will bring undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral women studying mathematics together with research mathematicians for an intensive residential workshop examining the frontiers of geometry. The program, which will take place May 14–25 on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study, is sponsored by the Institute and Princeton University and is supported by the National Science Foundation.

The lecture series Art and Its Spaces, a collaboration between the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University, continues on April 3 with a lecture at the Institute by Martha Ward, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. In "Crowded Walls: Twentieth-Century Nostalgia for Nineteenth-Century Installation," Ward will examine the nostalgia for densely hung exhibitions that developed among some French museological circles in the 1920s and 1930s, which has much to tell us about interpreting display practice.

At the great banquet at the British Club in Paris held on November 18, 1792, more than a hundred distinguished Anglo-American democrats, including Tom Paine, David Williams, Joel Barlow, Eleazar Oswald, John Oswald, Helen Maria Williams and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, gathered to celebrate liberty, human rights and the spread of democracy across the world—what they viewed as the assured democratic future of mankind. Mary Wollstonecraft, who joined the group at the hotel soon after the banquet was held, and several other founders of modern feminism were an integral part of this movement. In “Celebrating Modern Democracy’s Beginning: The ‘British Club’ in Paris (1789–93),” Jonathan Israel, Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, will explore the vast significance of the toasts drunk at this banquet and of the public address that was afterward presented to the French National Assembly.