welcome

The Nantes Institute for Advanced Study is a state-approved public benefit foundation that invites every academic year about thirty Fellows selected for the quality and originality of their work.

Drawing inspiration from the model of Princeton (1930) and Berlin (1980), the IAS-Nantes provides an inspirational setting for intellectual innovation. In a world in which research is increasingly hampered by the fragmentation of academic work, by budgetary constraints and programmatic research activity, the policy of the Institute is to enable the best researchers (Fellows) to leave behind their usual national, institutional and disciplinary contexts for a while in order to pursue research which they themselves have conceived, and to do so as part of a community of researchers from different geographical and disciplinary horizons in a serendipitous environment

Challenging the intellectual habits of their members, the IAS-Nantes is first and foremost conceived as breeding-ground for new and long-lasting networks of academic collaboration. The distinctive ambition of the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study is to create a new type of intellectual relationships between Western scholars and those from the rest of the world. By encouraging the latter to offer their viewpoints we hope to achieve a true diversity of approaches to current problems posed by globalization.