The Institute Letter, Fall/Winter 2026

In a book titled Medieval Art as Theology, Éric Palazzo, Elinor Lunder Founders’ Circle Member (2018–19) in the School of Historical Studies, invites readers to encounter medieval art not as a set of styles to be decoded from afar, but as a way of thinking and believing from within.

Rahul Ilango, Member in the School of Mathematics, studies computational complexity theory, which quantifies the amount of resources—like time and hardware—needed to solve computational tasks. Ilango has a particular interest in problems that bridge complexity theory with other fields, such as cryptography and proof complexity. 

Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Hans Kohn Member in the School of Historical Studies, studies the history and theory of architecture since the Enlightenment. Her current work examines institutions in Victorian London in which information collected from around the British empire was aggregated and organized to serve imperialist ends in the second half of the nineteenth century. 

Corey Robin, Member in the School of Social Science, is a political theorist and journalist whose scholarship addresses a range of topics across modern economic and political thought, from the role of fear in the Western imagination to the black nationalist roots of Justice Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence. He has published landmark work on the history of conservatism, including The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 

Nadine Soliman, NASA Hubble Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences, studies star and planet formation. At IAS, she’ll examine and simulate processes such as the collapse of molecular clouds, the birth of stellar clusters, and the formation of protoplanetary disks—all as case studies for larger questions about the interplay between microphysical processes and large-scale astrophysical structures.