In early April, the Department of Scandinavian Studies and the Jackson School of International Studies hosted Dr. Martin Cloonan, Director of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Dr. Cloonan visited several UW classrooms and gave a public talk to share lessons learned from his tenure as director of the Institute.
The first Institute for Advanced Studies was founded by Abraham Flexner at Princeton University in 1939, with the intention to provide researchers complete intellectual freedom to pursue scientific and academic progress unhindered. The Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies welcomed and hosted Jewish scientists fleeing from Nazi persecution like Albert Einstein. The success of the institute inspired the creation of other Institutes for Advanced studies around the world.
In Finland, Dr. Cloonan has sought to organize Institutes for Advanced Studies across the Nordic countries and to support interdisciplinary postdoctoral researchers in the humanities and social sciences, believing, in the words of Abraham Flexner before him, that scholars will “accomplish most when enabled to do so.”