Dr. Philippe Foret’s re-appointment
The European Institute for Advanced Study has re-appointed Prof. Philippe Forêt (History, Political Science and Religious Studies department) as one of its experts. He will rank multidisciplinary applications on the frontiers of science for 10-month residencies in the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities of Cambridge, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the Istituto di Studi Avanzati of Bologna, the Swedish Collegium, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, etc. Philippe will also serve as expert for the French National Research Agency. The ANR agency has invited him to serve on a new program, which has received an endowment of USD 700,000,000, and “is of pivotal importance to the French system of higher education and research.” Before the end of August, he will review several proposals that would lead to the creation of doctoral schools. Finally, Philippe will assess this summer the lifelong achievements of a distinguished scholar who he would nominate for the *** Prize, the award being of USD 1,700,000.
The Ludwig-Maximilians University and the Deutsches Museum of Munich have elected Philippe Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center. The Center will welcome him back next spring to complete the book whose proposal he has submitted to the University of Chicago Press. The manuscript of his other book will be mailed to the publisher this July and will come out in April 2018 for the Geneva Book Fair. In Geneva, Philippe’s team at the Graduate Institute has received from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF / FNS) a grant of USD 570,000 for a project that Philippe has developed with Prof. Marc Hufty on the governance of green energy and the global ecology of Lithium.
Philippe presented the SNF /FNS project on June 15 at the conference that he organized with the School of Engineering of NU and the School of Engineering of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). Financial support from Swissnex and swissuniversities made possible the first Swiss-Kazakh Seminar. More than 18 international researchers participated in this two-day event on “Towards Smart Sustainable Cities – Integrated Approaches.” They discussed with the Rector and our faculty future bilateral collaborations in sustainability, urban, and environmental studies, on energy, and in linguistics.
Philippe is now supervising three postdoctoral researchers in Hong Kong, Munich, and Zurich. One of his doctoral students will defend at the University of Sheffield her dissertation on Chinese garden architecture this fall.
These past two months, Philippe gave several talks in Munich (on the history of censorship in the geosciences, and on methodology in climate research in imperial China) and in Zurich (on volcanology in the environmental humanities). The prestigious “Ecole Normale Supérieure” of Paris has invited Philippe to come back as guest speaker to its seminar on the Asian perspectives on world history. He has submitted to the _Annales de géographie_ the paper prepared for his lecture in Paris, which was on the mapping of past climate change in central Asia, the paper read in Munich on the induction theory in Chinese climatology being sent to _Environmental History.
