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Ideas

How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound

Coedited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari

In How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, and contributors explore reading as a passive, active, and even embodied act with the capacity to stimulate, excite, frustrate, and confuse.

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

Lee Ann Fujii in a Social Science seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 2016–17 academic year

APSA Award Commemorates Former Social Science Member

August 08, 2019

Routledge’s Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence, presented by the American Political Science Association, honors the life and work of Lee Ann Fujii, Member (2016–17) in the School of Social Science. 

Ideas

Book cover for "A Time for Critique"

A Time for Critique

Edited by Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, and Bernard E. Harcourt, Visiting Professor (2016–17) in the School, are editors of a new book A Time for Critique (Columbia University Press, 2019), which calls for a systematic reappraisal of critical thinking and a reflection on the multiplying contexts and forms of critical discourse.

In the Media

Student sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960

To Build a Movement

July 29, 2019

Dissent’s Joshua Freeman reviews Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics by Professor Emeritus Michael Walzer writing, “Political Action is not about building a long-term movement . . . It is about how to change government policy and achieve desired actions in relation to discrete issues, one after another.” 

IAS News

2019 Dirac Medal Awarded to Distinguished Visiting Professor Rashid Sunyaev

August 08, 2019

Rashid Sunyaev, Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, has received the honor for his profound impact on modern cosmology. He shares the prize with former IAS Member Viatcheslav Mukhanov and Alexei Starobinsky.

In the Media

Get to Know 10 Early-Career Theorists

July 30, 2019

Symmetry Magazine profiles ten early-career scientists—including Clay Cordova, Long-term Member in the School of Natural Sciences since 2015 who will join the University of Chicago this fall—about what keeps them up at night, why they became theorists, and what they do when they're not doing physics.

In the Media

Didier Fassin lectures at the podium

Divide and Rule

July 15, 2019

In the London Review of Books, Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, examines the recent European elections from a French perspective, arguing that Emmanuel Macron’s representation of the democratic challenge for Europe as an alternative between “nationalists” and “progressives,” whom he would embody, is a mere rhetoric.

In the Media

The Encyclopedic Genius of Melville’s Masterpiece

August 01, 2019

“Time is a way of keeping track of things, of making order. You can be on time; you can allot the right amount of time; you can time events to be synchronous, or to avoid overlap. This kind of time does not appear in Moby Dick.” On the 200th anniversary of Herman Melville's birth, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, celebrates Melville's classic as a way of seeing the world.

IAS News

Daniel Freedman Among Recipients of 2019 Special Breakthrough Prize

August 06, 2019

Daniel Freedman, Member (1967–68, 73–74, 86–87) in the School of Natural Sciences, along with Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen receive the 2019 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the invention of supergravity, a “remarkable construction that extends Einstein’s theory of gravity to include quantum variables in the structure of spacetime,” said Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences.

Ideas

“The Institute”

By Dan Burt

The same is forecast
for tomorrow, the one bright patch a blackboard
crammed with symbols I cannot understand,
guarded by three words, DO NOT ERASE.

In the Media

Examining the Relationship between Math and Physics

August 01, 2019

What are the most important questions still to be addressed by physics and mathematics? Scientific American's Steve Mirsky writes about The Universe Speaks in Numbers symposium at IAS, inspired by Director's Visitor Graham Farmelo's book by the same title, quoting IAS Director Robbert Dijkgraaf, Professors Nima Arkani-Hamed and Freeman Dyson, Distinguished Visiting Professor Karen Uhlenbeck, and former IAS Professor Michael Atiyah.

Faculty and Members

“Maybe what really matters is not whether a nuclear weapon really works but whether we believe it does.”

Hugh Gusterson in How Do You Know a Nuclear Weapon Works if You Can’t Test It?

Everyone knows how liquid crystals work . . . what mathematical physics brings to that is to actually prove that this picture we all know is true is actually true.

Ian Jauslin in Liquid Crystals: Order Upon Disorder

Why did polymath Joris Hoefnagel, in the midst of the Dutch Revolt, produce an illustrated volume of hundreds of insects? 

Marisa Anne Bass in Insect Artifice

The Yemeni manuscript collections constitute a unique treasure trove for large segments of the Islamic intellectual tradition—Sunni as well as Shii—much of which has not survived anywhere else in the Islamic world.

Sabine Schmidtke in The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition