2025 marks 55 years since the first Fellows arrived at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (known as IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.
IASH was founded in 1969 as the world’s third Institute for Advanced Study, with an explicit commitment to fostering cutting-edge, blue-sky, interdisciplinary thinking across the arts and humanities and building international scholarly networks – a radical vision for that time. It welcomed its first Fellows in 1970, with the 1,500th appointed in 2024. Notable alumnae/i include scholars Anahid Nersessian, Perri 6, Sally Mapstone and Onora O’Neill, as well as playwrights Rona Munro and Femi Osofisan, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, and US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.
IASH is now far larger and more wide-ranging than its founders, Conrad Hal Waddington and John MacQueen, ever anticipated. As a community of practice of senior and early career scholars, the Institute aims to build an inclusive research culture and bring the scholarship of its Fellows to a broad set of audiences within and outwith the academy. It embraces the arts, social sciences and humanities, as well as interdisciplinary areas such as medical humanities, digital scholarship and gender studies.
The Institute is delighted to be holding a series of events to mark its 55th anniversary, the centrepiece of which is a conference celebrating the remarkable scholarship emerging from the recently completed Institute Project on Decoloniality (IPD), on Thursday 3 and Friday 4 April 2025. The conference will take place over two days in person at the National Museum of Scotland and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and online.
The event will feature a keynote address alongside contributions from Fellows present and past. The second day widens the scope of discussions to bring in local, national and international examples of the humanities in practice, as well as reflections on IASH’s own possible contributions in the future. Artistic interventions, from music to poetry, dance and film, will also be presented. The 2-day conference is free to attend.
To register to attend in-person or online, please visit iash55.eventbrite.co.uk
The article was written by Dr Ben Fletcher Watson
