Announcements
Fall 2024
Professor Hisham Matar’s new novel, My Friends, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize.
Here is a description of the novel as provided by the Booker Prizes page, which can be found here:
An intensely moving novel about three friends living in political exile and the emotional homeland that friendship can provide
Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan 18-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.
Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.
My Friends was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.
Dr. Matthew L. Keegan, the Moinian Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard
College, was awarded a Mellon fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the
School of Historical Studies for the 2024-2025 academic year. This prestigious membership
allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international
community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.
During his stay at the Institute, Dr. Keegan will work on a project on the understudied poetry
and prose of the era between the First Crusade and the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols.
Drawing on his recent articles, his project seeks to rethink this literature, which has often been
viewed through the lens of the Crusades. This era, however, was full of literary experimentation
with a range of concerns beyond the counter-Crusade.
Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and
distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an
interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly
competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by
the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty
include, Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, John von Neumann, Hetty Goldman, George Kennan,
and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Located in Princeton, NJ, the Institute for Advanced Study was established in 1930. Today,
research at IAS is conducted across four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural
Sciences, and Social Science—to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
Among past and present scholars, there have been 35 Nobel Laureates, 44 of the 62 Fields
Medalists, and 23 of the 27 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim
fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.