School of Historical Studies

Sofía Torallas Tovar, a renowned papyrologist, has joined IAS as long-term Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Historical Studies. A prolific scholar of the ancient Mediterranean, Torallas Tovar's work encompasses Greek and Coptic magical texts, funerary practices and culture, patristic literature, the Coptic Bible, and Philo and Alexandrian Judaism.

Ellie M. Hisama, Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies in the School of Historical Studies, has been presented with an honorary membership of the American Musicological Society (AMS). Considered to be the Society's highest honor, such memberships are presented to scholars who have made "extraordinary contributions to the Society and to the study and teaching of music."

Drawing on her perspective as a historian of medieval religion and society and her specialization in medieval France, Anne Elisabeth Lester, Visitor in the School of Historical Studies, recounts the devastating fire that engulfed Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in April 2019, and the subsequent efforts to rebuild it, for the American Historical Association's newsmagazine  Perspectives on History.

Rubina Raja, Member (2019) in the School of Historical Studies, has received one of the Carlsberg Foundation’s Research Prizes for 2024. She was honored, in part, for work conducted at the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria. 

A new study of ancient DNA by a team of international researchers, including Patrick Geary, Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Historical Studies, provides insight into the development of and social structures within European rural communities following the fall of the Roman Empire. Some of these communities, about the formation of which little was previously known, would eventually become the basis for many modern European countries.

The field-shaping work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Professor Emerita in the School of Historical Studies, and her significant impact on historical scholarship well beyond her areas of specialization, has been celebrated in a symposium published in a recent issue of the journal Common Knowledge.