Ideas

The emergence of Judaism is closely intertwined with the emergence of Samaritanism. Both are heirs of ancient Israelite traditions, and the predecessors of both shared the same religious and literary culture. Until the second century B.C.E., this...

Why should we write the history and sociology of the social sciences? Some have suggested that putting science under the sociological microscope is self-indulgent and dangerously relativist. Others murmur that only those who can’t do science study...

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has authored Life: A Critical User’s Manual (Polity Press, 2018), which asks "How can we think of life in its dual expression—matter and experience, the living and the...

On April 6, 1960, Institute for Advanced Study Director Robert Oppenheimer received a letter from psychologist John E. Drevdahl, requesting his support in setting up a study among IAS Members to assess the factors that made them creative. Thus far...

Nicola Di Cosmo, Luce Foundation Professor in East Asian Studies in the School of Historical Studies, has co-edited Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which offers an integrated picture of Rome...

Western—European and North American—historiography generally portrays the years between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as having given birth to the modern world—a republican world founded on rational discourse and...

In his award-winning novel Life of Pi, published in 2001, the French-Canadian writer Yann Martel relates the fantastic adventure of a boy from India who survives a shipwreck and spends 227 days in the Pacific Ocean, sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal...

Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science, has edited The Jewish Political Tradition: Volume III: Community.

The third in a four-volume series, Community includes chapters on the communal bond, marriage and family, welfare...

Writing for NRC Handelsblad, Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor, likens IAS Professor and Abel Prize Laureate Robert Langlands’s program, “a deep connection between two completely different parts of mathematics: on the one hand, numbers and their relations, on the other hand, geometrical patterns and their symmetries,” to a mathematical Rosetta Stone.

On May 20, 1930, a certificate of incorporation was filed with the State of New Jersey, marking the creation of the Institute for Advanced Study. Neither a university nor a research organization, the Institute fulfilled the dreams of its first...