Ideas

Peniel Joseph, Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member in the School of Social Science (2025–26), discusses revisiting James Baldwin through an interdisciplinary lens—as a historian, sociologist, and artist shaped by Beauford Delaney and jazz-like prose. 

In her new book Learning through Collective Memory Work: Troubling Testimonio in Post-war Peru, Goya Wilson Vásquez, Visitor (2023–24) in the School of Social Science, examines the creation of testimonio—a genre of testimonial narrative rooted in Latin American traditions—as collective memory work.

In 1995, Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science and American political theorist, published States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Thirty years later, Princeton University Press has issued the book as part of the Princeton Classics collection.

Alyssa Battistoni, Member (2022–23) in the School of Social Science, reflects on her book Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature in an interview that traces how “free gifts of nature” help explain what capitalism uses but doesn’t price—from ecological processes to pollution framed as an “externality.” 

The Institute’s School of Social Science turned its focus for the 2025–26 academic year to the theme of Digital (In)Equality. The parentheses in the title gesture to what Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School and the theme year’s organizer, refers to as the “double-edged-ness” of the contemporary digital ecosystem. Nelson’s convening insight challenges the dominant narratives around technology: both techno-optimism and techno-pessimism miss the point.

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. 

Paisley Currah, Robbert Dijkgraaf Member in the School of Social Science (2024–25), describes how the Institute for Advanced Study enriches conversation and research across languages and cultures, bringing about new ways of thinking about his work on gender and sexuality studies.

Ulla Berg, Member in the School of Social Science (2024–25), explores how anthropologists engage in "deep hanging out" to better understand different cultures and communities. She also discusses her involvement in conversations at the Institute for Advanced Study that address some of society’s most pressing questions.

E. Tendayi Achiume, Ashvin B. Chhabra and Daniela Bonafede-Chhabra Member in the School of Social Science (2024–25), describes how cross-disciplinary exchanges at the Institute for Advanced Study, including a flute performance by Shabaka Hutchings, inspired new perspectives on her research.

The option to choose where to live, what to buy, and what to believe has been neither universally available nor consistently desired throughout history. Sophia Rosenfeld, Ed Kaufmann Founders' Circle Member (2014–15) in the School of Social Science, traces the evolution of choice from the seventeenth century to today, asking how it has become a defining feature of modern freedom.