Ideas

In this video, George Steinmetz, Visiting Professor in the School of Social Science, considers the ways that writing the history of the social sciences helps us understand the conditions in which knowledge evolves, declines, and flourishes during a...

On March 14, 2018, the Institute for Advanced Study hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for Rubenstein Commons, a new $20 million campus building that will provide a necessary space for enhanced communication and collaboration among Faculty and scholars at one of the world's leading centers for curiosity-driven basic research.

On Einstein's birthday we mourn the passing of Stephen Hawking, an equally brilliant mind and inspiring human being. His ideas about black holes, spacetime and the Big Bang will live forever, only grow in importance, and permeate the universe.
—Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor

Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences, has authored Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (Liveright, 2018). The book is a collection of personal letters to relatives, written between 1940 and the late...

Most scholarship on Ottoman art takes the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as their focus, the glorious periods of the building of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, the well-known domed mosques of the architect Sinan, the Iznik pottery, the floral...

The field of cosmology has come a long way toward understanding the universe as a physical system: we’ve mapped its history and structure in great detail, we know what it went through since a few seconds after its birth until today, we understand...

Two pairs of earrings, four bracelets, and a mixtape inspired me to write this book. I was in the Stadtmuseum in the German city of Jena, peering into the various display cases of an exhibit called Freundschaft! Mythos und Realität im Alltag der DDR...

Harvard University Press has published Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian by Angelos Chaniotis, Professor in the School of Historical Studies, which provides a compelling narrative of the main events that shaped ancient...

In this video, Kathleen Coleman, Elinor Lunder Founders' Circle Member in the School of Historical Studies, examines gladiatorial combat, beast displays, and staged executions in order to understand why the violent spectacles of the Roman...

Half a century ago a French historian of rural Languedoc published a history of climate and people: climate changes, is subject to fluctuations, and (since history is about change) climate is the object of history.2 Le Roy Ladurie’s implied (if...