Lepenies To Lecture At Institute For Advanced Study

Sociologist Wolf Lepenies, visiting professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, will speak on “The Missing Sentence: The Visual Arts and the Social Sciences in Mid–19th-Century Paris,” on November 6 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus. The lecture is sponsored by the Institute’s School of Social Science.

Professor Lepenies will discuss the etchings of Charles Meryon, who gave visual expression to the transformation of Paris when modernization meant disruption of the city. He will trace the network of relationships in the Paris of the time of Napoleon III and Haussmann that connected the circle of Positivist thinkers to a group of visual artists. He will also show what role the experience of the city of Paris played for August Comte and the emergence of the Positivist movement.

Lepenies was director of the Wissenschaftskolleg [Institute for Advanced Study] in Berlin from 1986 to 2001, and is a permanent fellow of that institution. Under his directorship, the Wissenschaftskolleg made an effort to found similar institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, notably in Budapest and Bucharest. Lepenies has taught at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Texas, Austin, among other institutions; and held the Chaire Europ�enne at the Coll�ge de France, Paris.

Lepenies is an associate member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He has been a member in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Social Science on three previous occasions.

A frequent speaker at international universities, he delivered the 1999 Tanner Lectures at Harvard University, and the Isaiah Berlin Lecture at the British Academy, London.

Lepenies has published widely in Europe and the United States; many of his books have been issued in French, German, and other languages. Among his publications in English are Human Ethology: Claims and Limits of a New Discipline (co-edited, 1979); Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories (co-edited, 1983); Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (1988); and The End of German Culture (forthcoming). His new study of 19th-century French critic and author Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, titled Sainte-Beuve: On the Threshold of Modernity, has just been published in French by Gallimard.

Professor Lepenies earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Munster, Germany. He did his undergraduate work at the universities of Munich, Munster and Berlin.

The lecture is free and open to the public. For further information, call (609) 734-8254.