Friends of the Institute

Despite all the charms of Downton Abbey, real-life aristocrats played a much darker role in the 1930s. With the British empire under threat and Bolshevism on the rise, many decided to support authoritarian and fascist regimes. Aristocratic women in...

Dr. Libby O'Connell, chief historian for History Channel, will discuss American culinary history and food traditions in this talk drawn from her new book The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites. Dr. O'Connell's lecture explores key...

The last decades have seen great advances in our understanding of the history of our universe. I will summarize our current knowledge, describe some of the puzzles that still remain and speculate about future developments in cosmology. Matias...

This special Friends Event will feature the novelist and columnist Pia de Jong, who will be reading from her most recent work and discussing her life as a writer in the United States. Since moving to Princeton with her family in 2012, Pia de Jong...

Join returning speaker Francine Segan and discover the elaborate etiquette, enchanting entertainments, and dishes Mrs. Patmore would have been proud to send to the table. Vivid descriptions of Lord Grantham-esque dinner parties, cotillions, and...

Every day, at the Institute for Advanced Study and elsewhere, scientists and scholars are exploring the frontiers of knowledge, from the structure of the universe to the patterns of human thought. But what is the shortest path from A to B, if you do...

A knot is simply a tangled loop in ordinary three-dimensional space, such as often causes us frustration in everyday life. Knots are also the subject of a rather rich mathematical theory. In the last three decades, it has unexpectedly turned out...

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was founded in the 1740s as a utopian religious community. At the turn of the twentieth century, it became one of the iconic steel towns of industrial America, a destination for working-class immigrants and the producer of...