2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

Director’s Report
Once more our Fellowship Program added luster to both
Italy and Columbia. We received about 200 high-level
applications for the 18 Fellowships we were able to make
available this past year. In terms of quality of research and productive
output, the standard of Fellows was as high as any of the most
well-known research institutes in the world. It remains to the credit
of both the Republic of Italy and Columbia to have had the vision
of establishing such a center for advanced study—one of the earliest
centers of this kind. No other nation in the world has achieved
anything similar in the U.S. The Italian Academy now ranks with the
very best of the smaller centers for advanced study, and is looked to
by many as an exemplar of both quality and efficiency of operation—
“a lither and more nimble version” (as the chief grant-giving officer of
one of the largest of the American philanthropic foundations recently
put it) of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Our innovative
co-funding programs remain examples which many strive to follow.
We remain notable for the genuinely cross-disciplinary program
which we pioneered across advanced areas of research in both the
sciences and the humanities, and for the youthfulness and energy of
our body of Fellows.
It is precisely this last characteristic, as well as our Fellows’
wide range of interests, all reflecting on the power and reach of
Italian scholarship and
science, that so impressed
Ambassador
Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata,
now Foreign Minister of
Italy, when he paid a surprise
and most welcome
visit to the reception for
our new Fellows at the
beginning of the academic
year. I think he was
struck not only by the
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