Presentation

The IAS are powerful forces of international attractiveness owing to the quality of the fellowships they offer to leading foreign scholars and scientists. Since 2007, more than 700 fellows have enjoyed periods of residence in the four French IAS.

With their selective invitation procedures and fellowships that encourage collegial interaction, the IAS promote new approaches to problem and new avenues of research.

The fellowship arrangements offered by the four member IAS are different and complementary, in terms of both linkages to the policies of each site and the scientific objectives pursued.

The general principles that should shape an institute for advanced study were discussed extensively within the network. The result of these collegial deliberations is a charter unanimously approved by the Board of Trustees in 2012. The general principles of the charter, based on the experience of major international institutes, were subsequently adopted in the major European and international networks of IAS.

The charter of the French IAS (excerpt)
The conditions required for the fellowship policy of an institute for advanced study are provided as follows. An IAS should:
• have its own space or location of residence and work † 1;
• offer conditions that free the invited fellows from teaching and administrative obligations (depending on the terms of the convention between the institute and the fellow), as well as working conditions of very high quality † 1 2;
• constitute a multidisciplinary, international academic community, a venue for discussion and intellectual sociability in both formal and informal settings, so as to favour new approaches to problems, unusual intellectual collaborations and the birth of new avenues of research † 2;
• adopt a fellows invitation policy that is both selective and spread over broad disciplinary horizons; individual or collective applicants are selected at the end of a process that meets the best international standards and is based on the principles of scientific risk taking and management independance † 3;
• have a dedicated budget ample enough for a multi-year invitation policy (at least equivalent to 120 researcher-months per group of fellows and per academic year).

An institute for advanced study in France can either be an independent legal entity whose independence is ensured by the membership of its decision-making bodies, or have an autonomous status recognised by the sponsoring institution in an agreement setting out the objectives.

1 A location
An institute for advanced study has its roots in a physical location where a community of researchers gathers for an academic year. It possesses its own buildings, which enable it to offer individual and group working spaces that are conducive to reflection and exchange of ideas. In Nantes, a building was built for the IAS on the banks of the Loire. In Paris, the institute is housed in a prestigious mansion house on the Île Saint-Louis. IMéRA is established in the renovated astronomical observatory in Marseille. The Collegium de Lyon has offices, as well as a residential building of high environmental quality on the Gerland site.
 

2 An academic ambition
The central principle of an IAS is an international invitation policy for scholars and scientists, who spend their period of residence concentrating on their work, while at the same time broadening their views by discovering other epistemological and methodological approaches. On this common foundation, each institute pursues its academic project through specific objectives (based for example on thematic or geographical criteria) and special implementation procedures (support for the organisation of seminars and lectures, introductions to researchers and laboratories either at the IAS site or at national level, support for the preparation of individual or group projects, etc.).
 

3 An invitation policy
In line with its academic ambition, each institute is highly attentive to the composition of each annual group of fellows in order to form a multidisciplinary research community of both junior and senior scholars. The international invitation policy of each institute is applied in observance of the principles of openness and scientific innovation enshrined in the IAS charter. The large number of applications received each year allows the institutes to form unusual, high-quality groups of fellows each year.