IAS Welcomes Over 250 Scholars for 2022–23 Academic Year
Press Contact
Today, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) celebrates the formal start of the 2022–23 academic year. David Nirenberg, Director and Leon Levy Professor, will deliver remarks as 281 new and returning scholars arrive on campus—from postdoctoral fellows at the beginning of their research careers to distinguished senior academics and 24 permanent Faculty. The 2022–23 scholarly community hails from 36 countries, representing approximately 107 academic institutions worldwide.
“I have the joyful responsibility of welcoming more than 250 of the planet’s most interesting scholars to our community,” stated Nirenberg. “As a past IAS Visitor, I have myself experienced the riches of the Institute’s research environment, and know the intellectual transformations it produces. I look forward to the discoveries they will offer the world.”
Bhargav Bhatt, Fernholz Joint Professor in the School of Mathematics, is the most recent Faculty appointment. Previously a Member (2012–14) and Visitor (2020), Bhatt is one of the leading figures of the recent revolution in p-adic geometry.
Wei Ho, a former Visitor (2020), returns to IAS as a Visiting Professor and as the first Director of Women and Mathematics (WAM). Established in 1993 and first held at IAS in 1994, the annual program aims to recruit and retain more women in mathematics, supporting female scholars at various stages of their careers.
All scholars are based within one of the Institute’s four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science. The following four scholars, each of whom you can read more about, represent a unique cross-section of this year’s class:
- Historical Studies Member Verena Krebs’s research concerns transcultural Medieval and pre-Modern African and global history. She aims to “broaden the geographic scope of medieval history, reassess commonly held paradigms about European-African interactions, and push people to re-think the importance of African polities in a larger pre-modern world.”
- The interests of Mathematics Member D. Dominique Kemp are in harmonic analysis, namely the mathematical procedure for describing and analyzing phenomena of a periodically recurrent (or oscillating) nature, such as sound waves and tides. He states, “The beginning of my research career has been a series of small steps into this realm.”
Kemp, along with 28 fellow scholars, will participate in the School’s special year, led by Distinguished Visiting Professor Tamar Ziegler. The program will probe the still-evolving interfaces between ergodic theory, additive combinatorics, multiplicative number theory, and algebraic geometry. It will build on spectacular advancements that have been made in interlacing these fields over the past two decades.
- Sophie Lund Schrøder will join the School of Natural Sciences to continue her work on binary stars. Binaries are pairs of stars that orbit each other, in a similar manner to the way in which the Moon orbits Earth. She states, “The most well-known example of a binary star system is the two suns that Luke Skywalker looks at from Tatooine!”
- The scholarship of K-Sue Park, a Member in the School of Social Science, examines how colonization and enslavement have shaped the legal institutions and practices that we know today, including ones that we take for granted. While at IAS, she will work on her forthcoming book, which focuses on the history of the land system and how it produced a racialized society in America.
The 2022–23 theme seminar of the School of Social Science, “Climate Crisis Politics”, will explore how questions raised by the climate crisis reorient 21st century political, social, and economic thought and practice, and examine theories that will rise to meet these challenges.
The theme seminar will be led by Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor (IAS) and Timothy Mitchell, William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (Columbia University), in collaboration with Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor (IAS) and Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor (IAS).
IAS scholars are selected by the permanent Faculty in a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions.
Learn more about our scholars and their research here.
About the Institute
The Institute for Advanced Study has served the world as one of the leading independent centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry since its establishment in 1930, advancing the frontiers of knowledge across the sciences and humanities. From the work of founding IAS faculty such as Albert Einstein and John von Neumann to that of the foremost thinkers of the present, the IAS is dedicated to enabling curiosity-driven exploration and fundamental discovery.
Each year, the Institute welcomes more than 200 of the world’s most promising post-doctoral researchers and scholars who are selected and mentored by a permanent Faculty, each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Among present and past Faculty and Members there have been 35 Nobel Laureates, 44 of the 62 Fields Medalists, and 22 of the 25 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as many MacArthur Fellows and Wolf Prize winners.
