Vassar History Professor Mita Choudhury Begins Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study
Vassar Professor of History on the Evalyn Clark Chair Mita Choudhury has started her fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the School of Historical Studies for the 2025–26 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.
“I am honored to be a member of the Institute of Advanced Study at the School of Historical Studies,” said Professor Choudhury. “I am taking full advantage of the time and space this opportunity is providing me this semester for extensive research and engagement across disciplines.”
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.
During her stay, Professor Choudhury will work on a book-length project examining sexual violence in the early modern French Church. Centering around recent Black feminist scholarship, its analysis challenges traditional church histories by foregrounding sexual violence, trauma, subjectivity, and silence found in 17th- and 18th-century court records from French archives.
“Through my research I am interrogating why and how both historical actors and historians, including myself, have contributed to this silence surrounding assault. By incorporating multidisciplinary methodologies—memoir writing, religious studies, and trauma studies—I will show how the visibility of personal stakes may lead to new forms of history,” she added.
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 37 Nobel laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 24 of the 28 Abel Prize laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows and winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.