Ideas

Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory, a pioneering work of eighteenth and nineteenth century art history, has been published by Penn State University Press. Sarah Betzer, a Member and former Visitor (2014–15, 2016) in the School of Historical Studies, wrote the book during her time at the Institute, culminating in the groundbreaking and widely-acclaimed text that spans a century-and-a-half and offers new account of the distinctively modern allure of the antique.

Pinakia, here shown as casts made of Plaster of Paris, were small bronze plates used in ancient Athens for the process of democratically selecting a group of citizens to serve on a jury. Athenian citizens would nominate themselves for jury duty, volunteering their bronze plates to be inserted into a kleroterion (a machine with rows of slots and a built-in lottery system).

Past Visitor (2015–21) Karina Urbach’s book Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook, originally published in German to wide acclaim,has been published in English, with a translation by Jamie Bulloch. 

Patrick Geary is co-PI of the European Research Council funded research project HistoGenes, which uses a combination of genomic, archaeological, anthropological, and historical methods to study over six-thousand burial sites in the Carpathian Basin between the fifth and tenth centuries.

In this Scholar Spotlight we feature Douglas Flowe who is a Member in the School of Historical Studies. He discusses his work on incarceration and the influences he had in life to follow this path.

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.