The Institute Letter, Fall/Winter 2026

In a collaboration born from overlapping terms in the School of Natural Sciences, Elena Murchikova, Member (2018–22) and frequent Visitor, and Kailash Sahu, Member (2022–23), have challenged prevailing assumptions about the visibility of isolated black holes.

Sihao Cheng, Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Member (2022–25) in the School of Natural Sciences, who led a team to the discovery of a trans-Neptunian object potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet, shares—in his own words—a reflection on how the new object was identified.

What happens when a planet plows through the swirling disk of gas and dust that surrounds a young star? Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member Callum W. Fairbairn and NASA Einstein Fellow Alexander Dittmann, both from the School of Natural Sciences, have shed light on this, broadening our understanding of planets on elliptical, or “eccentric,” orbits.

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.” 

Resolving the deep conflict between the principles of gravity and quantum mechanics—and more generally, developing a theory of “quantum gravity”—is a major open question in theoretical physics. By building on and extending one another’s research, IAS scholars past and present have made substantial progress in this area, generating insights that continue to influence research. 

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.

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.

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.

When Ellen Eischen, von Neumann Fellow (2024–25) in the School of Mathematics, followed a stray thread of “lost math” into the Institute’s Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, she uncovered the story of Hel Braun—and a mid-century perspective that still has consequences for research today. Eischen's investigations show what mathematics can forfeit when it treats its truths as untouched by the human, institutional, and political realities that shape them.