By Ann Guy
Carolyn Merchant, a professor of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics, will join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., as a member for the fall 2012 semester. She will be working on the project “Ideas of Nature in the Scientific Revolution,” a study for which she also received an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship this year.
The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry, and exists to encourage and support fundamental research in the sciences and humanities. It is a private, independent academic institution founded in 1930 by philanthropists Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Past faculty have included Albert Einstein, who remained at the Institute until his death in 1955, and distinguished scientists and scholars such as Kurt Gödel, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Homer A. Thompson, and Hermann Weyl.
The American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship Program awards fellowships to individual scholars working in the humanities and related social sciences.
In 2011 Merchant was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.