Ideas

Historian Jérémie Foa offers a very unique view of the 1572 massacres in his work entitled Tous ceux qui tombent: visages du massacre de la Saint–Barthélemy [All that fall: faces of the St. Bartholomew's day massacre]. He exhumes the “small lives” that were taken by reconstituting history in minute detail and honoring the names of the anonymous victims.

The new Rubenstein Commons building at the Institute for Advanced Study, designed by Steven Holl Architects, stands in stark contrast to the explicitly functionalist forms of other modern buildings on campus: the Member housing, designed by Marcel Breuer, or even the welcoming but austere (what’s known as “brutalist”) spaces of the dining hall, designed by Robert Geddes.

Yve-Alain Bois, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, has completed volume two of his catalogue raisonné of American painter Ellsworth Kelly. Working with the artist’s estate, Bois has produced a thorough catalogue of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and reliefs between the years 1954 and 1958, including high-quality reproductions of the art, history of ownership and exhibition, and bibliographic notes. 

Rosanna Dent is an historian of science, a Member in the School of Historical Studies, and Assistant Professor, Federated History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She pursues research at the intersection of medicine, Latin American history...

Alison Locke Perchuk, past Member in the School of Historical Studies (2018-19), has authored the first interdisciplinary account of the Monastery of St. Elijah, built circa 1122-26 near Rome. It includes archaeological and historical readings of the monastery’s architecture, frescoes, and sculpture, with an eye toward epigraphy, liturgy, theology, memory, and landscape.

The University of Washington Press has published Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx: The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights by Jonathan Israel in June 2021:

“In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but...

The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II by Jonathan Haslam, George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies, was published May 25, 2021, by Princeton University Press:

“The Spectre of War looks at...

The dramatic story of the origins of the Second World War has long been used by politicians to buttress foreign policy. The stark lesson, certainly in Britain, where the consequences of naïveté were the most severe, but also for the French, who...

How do we teach something we don’t yet know? In today’s Scholar Spotlight, Historical Studies Member Anna Bokov discusses her research on architecture and design pedagogy, the pursuit of truth and beauty, and breaking the rules (and making your own). 

Since March, the world resembles a disaster movie. For their plot, screenwriters follow a proven model: scientists warn about a threat—an earthquake, a volcano, a virus, a meteor, or a terrorist attack; politicians ignore the warning because of...