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

THE SCHOOL OF HISTORICAL STUDIES
During that time he conducted a seminar on a Greek inscription and presented a talk on
new developments at Petra in Jordan.
In 1999, Professor Bowersock was elected a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of
Sciences in Moscow, and he received an honorary doctorate from the Ecole Pratique des
Hautes Etudes in Paris. During his visit to Paris for the ceremony in December he
addressed the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on the topic of "Les Euemerioi
et les confreries joyeuses." In the first part of 2000, he spoke on the Euemerioi before the
Near Eastern Department at Indiana University, and he delivered a Faculty Lecture at the
University of Western Ontario on the building of the first basilica of St. Peter's on the
Vatican in Rome. He contributed a paper (unfortunately in absentia) to a session on
W. L. Westermann at the annual meeting of the American Association of Ancient
Historians, held in Madison, Wisconsin. In early June, he joined several colleagues in a
two-week visit to Sicily.
Among the publications of Professor Bowersock in 1999-2000 was the encyclopedic
volume that he edited together with Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, Late Antiquity: A
Guide to the Postclassical World, published by Harvard. His other publications included a
study of Petra as a Graeco-Roman city and a long delayed analysis of historical material
in the Syriac Life of Rabbula. He continued to serve on the editorial boards of several
journals, and he saw two new volumes published in the series Revealing Antiquity, for
which he is General Editor at the Harvard University Press. One of those volumes was
The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modem West by former Institute Member Aldo
Schiavone. Professor Bowersock flew back to Europe at the end of June to chair a meet-
ing of the Comite Scientifique of the Maison de l'Orient in Lyon.
In the academic year 1999-2000, PROFESSOR GILES CONSTABLE published a col-
lection of articles (his fifth), which included a bibliography of his publications from 1953
through 1999. He also published three further articles, a memoir, and a review. He gave
lectures or talks at the Ninth Annual Conference of the Texas Medieval Association in
Amarillo (September), a colloquium on "Byzantine Monastic Documents" at Dumbarton
Oaks (March), a meeting on "Spanning Consciousness: The Mediterranean as Fons et
Origo" at the University of Messina (March), and the University of Oxford (May), and
he commented on a paper presented at the Davis Center, Princeton (April). Together
with Professor Robert Somerville of Columbia, he organized a meeting (the first to be
held in this country) of the Commission Internationale de Diplomatique (September),
which (in spite of hurricane Floyd) met both at the Institute for Advanced Study and at
Columbia University, with a side trip to The Cloisters. Professor Constable attended
meetings at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Fordham Univer-
sity. He arranged the usual meeting of the Delaware Valley Medieval Association, at
which several members of the School of Historical Studies spoke, in December. He was
appointed to the Advisory Board of the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages.
PROFESSOR PATRICIA CRONE continued to work on Islamic political thought,
deciding to take the book she is writing on that subject down to the Mongol invasions
(mid-thirteenth century) instead of stopping in c. 1100. She gave lectures on various
aspects of political thought in early Islam in Frankfurt in January, in Princeton in Febru-
ary, and at Harvard in March, and she spoke about developments in the study of Islamic
history in the last fifty years at a conference on the future of history at Wellesley in April.
43