Professor Brandon Look has been invited to be the Hans Kohn Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey for academic year 2011-12.

The Institute for Advanced Study is a private, independent research center, founded in 1930, whose goal is to foster and support theoretical research and intellectual inquiry in the sciences and humanities.  It is divided into four Schools -- Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences  -- and has a permanent faculty of 28 distinguished thinkers.  Each year the Institute invites approximately 190 scientists and scholars from around the world to be members and to work and study within its community.

Past faculty have included Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Harold Cherniss, Clifford Geertz, Erwin Panofsky, J. Robert Oppenheimer, George Kennan and Michael Walzer.  And among its past members and faculty are 26 recipients of the Nobel Prize, 38 of 52 winners of the Fields medal in Mathematics, and many winners of the Wolf and MacArthur prizes.

Professor Look is one of four philosophers invited this year.  He plans to devote his time at the Institute to his research on the history of eighteenth-century German philosophy and, in particular, Kant's critique of Leibnizian rationalism.