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Press Release

Public Lecture: Myles W. Jackson on Genes, Patents, and Race

October 18, 2018
Myles W. Jackson, newly appointed Professor in the School of Historical Studies, will give his first IAS public lecture. Jackson will discuss how the history of science can contribute to two controversial aspects of biomedical research: gene patenting and race and genomics.

Ideas

Founders’ Statement on America and Higher Learning

“We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.”

IAS News

Adrian Hamers Wins 2018 Christiaan Huygens Science Award

October 15, 2018
Adrian Hamers, Peter Svennilson Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has won the Christiaan Huygens Prize in the field of space sciences for Hamers’s doctoral dissertation, which addresses fundamental problems in transcending areas within the dynamics of astronomical systems.

In the Media

New Yorker Review of Didier Fassin's Life: A Critical User's Manual

October 19, 2018
The New Yorker calls the book "provocative," writing: "Fassin points to the force-feeding of hunger strikers in prisons to illustrate that merely keeping people alive is an insufficient stance to hold, when 'self-realization' is impossible without conditions that make life bearable."

Ideas

Designing a Laboratory for Ideas

By Rafael Pelli, Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects

While The Simons Center is itself a distinct structure with its own sense of place, it emulates the sensibility of the existing pavilions, taking cues from their proportions and details and interpreting them in a contemporary way.

Ideas

Julian Bigelow: Bridging Abstract Logic and Practical Machines

By George Dyson

The reason the von Neumann computer project was so successful, and its design so widely replicated, was not just that all technical details of the new machine were , , , but that there was temporary housing available, adjacent to the computer building, where visitors could stay while running their problems and learning about the new machine.

Ideas

Genetics and Identity

By Patrick J. Geary

The imagined unity of a people could derive from shared customs, language, a common law, and a belief in a common origin, whether or not this origin was factual.

Faculty and Members

I hope we'll have a deeper understanding of the relationship between gravity and quantum mechanics. It seems like black holes are sort of the frontier in trying to do that.

Douglas Stanford in the Cool Alter-Ego of a Black Hole

Produced by the communities who were at the heart of the events, Syriac sources compel us to reconsider what “conquests” means.

Muriel Debié in Syriac Sources and Sasanian and Arab-Muslim Occupation of the Middle East

The presence of a few prominent female figures and seemingly favorable statistics do not tell the whole story. 

Anne-Claire Defossez in Women in French Politics

[Ancient history] is a discipline in which truth and beauty don't always overlap. Truth is very often not beautiful. And beauty may be deceptive. And knowledge, well, it is very elusive. But ideas we do have. Many of them.

Angelos Chaniotis in A Child Prodigy in Ancient Rome