Report for the academic year - Libraries - Institute for Advanced Study

THt SCHOOL Ob HISTOR] DIES
GLEN W. BOWERSOCK
GILES CONSTABLE
PATRICIA CRONE, Andrew W. Melion Professor
IRVING LAVIN
JACK F. MATLOCK, Jr., George F. Kennan Professor
HEINRICH von STADEN
BENJAMIN ELMAN
MARSHALL CLAGETT
OLEG GRABAR
CHRISTIAN HABICHT
GEORGE F. KENNAN
PETER PARET
HOMER A. THOMPSON
(deceased May 7, 2000)
MORTON WHITE
The School of Historical Studies is concerned principally with the history of Western and
Near Eastern civilization. Within this wide area of study, a large range of topics has been
explored at one time or another by Faculty and Members, but the emphasis has been particularly
strong in the fields of Greek and Roman civilization, medieval, early modern
and modern European history, Islamic culture, and the history of art, science, and ideas.
The particular emphases of the School are a product of its own history. Two years after
the opening of the School of Mathematics in 1933, a School of Economics and Politics
and a School of Humanistic Studies were established. In Humanistic Studies, the first
professor was Benjamin Dean Meritt, a specialist in Greek history and epigraphy, who was
closely associated with excavations in the Athenian Agora. The second appointment to
the Faculty of the School of Humanistic Studies was that of the German art historian
Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky ranged through the entire gamut of European art from the mid-
dle ages to motion pictures, but he was most closely associated with the development of
the field of iconology.
Three additional appointments strengthened the field of classical and Near Eastern
studies: Elias Avery Lowe, a Latin paleographer who worked on the handwriting of pre-
ninth century manuscripts; Ernst Herzfeld, a Near Eastern archaeologist and historian,
whose scholarly work comprised nearly 200 titles; and Hetty Goldman, one of the
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