Faculty

During Augustus’s reign (late first century B.C.E.), the philosopher Athenodoros returned from Rome to his hometown Tarsos, in southwest Turkey. When he found the city dominated by the poet and demagogue Boethos, he used the authority given to him...

Jonathan Haslam, George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies, has authored Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which charts the labyrinthine story of Soviet...

Brill Academic Publishers has published The Yemeni Manuscript Tradition (2015), edited by Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, David Hollenberg of the University of Oregon, and Christoph Rauch of Staatsbibliothek zu...

The Qurʾān defines itself as the last, perfect link in a chain of progressive divine revelations. This determines the ambivalent attitude of the Qurʾān and the Muslim tradition towards the two earlier monotheistic religions: Judaism and Christianity...

The following excerpt is from the article “Can We Survive Technology?” by John von Neumann, published by Fortune magazine in 1955. Von Neumann was among the Institute’s first Professors and its youngest. Having pioneered the modern computer, game theory, nuclear deterrence, and more, von Neumann illuminated the fields of pure and applied mathematics, computer science, physics, and economics. 

In January 1984, Alexander Grothendieck submitted to the French National Centre for Scientific Research his proposal “Esquisse d’un Programme.” Soon copies of this text started circulating among mathematicians. A few months later, as a first-year...

The following text is excerpted from Our Declaration: A Reading of the ­Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014) by Danielle Allen, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science.

The...

Sabine Schmidtke, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, and Gudrun Krämer have edited Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies (Brill Academic Publishers, 2014). The present volume–grown out of an international...

How can historians contribute to investigating the ­relationships between climate change, ecology, and human activity? Scientific research is making available ­volumes of data on the possible correlations between ­environmental change and social...

In his recent book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catas­trophe in the Seventeenth Century, Geoffrey Parker states: “although climate change can and does produce human catastrophe, few historians include the weather in their analyses.” This is...