Introduction


The Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) at Durham University , based in the early eighteenth-century Cosin’s Hall, brings together some of the most eminent and creative scholars, artists, and public figures from around the world. The IAS is one of only a handful of comparable institutions globally that promotes dialogue across all the disciplines. The IAS builds on Durham University’s research excellence in subject areas across this disciplinary spectrum, to harness the energy and insight that working across boundaries – disciplinary, professional, and spatial – can release.


The Institute’s approach is distinctive: it fosters engagement in research organised around annual themes of major academic, public and policy significance such as; the Legacy of Charles Darwin (2006/07); Modelling (2007/08); Being Human (2008/09); Water (2009/10), Futures (2010/11); Futures II (2011/12) and this year, Time. The IAS’s themes have broad interdisciplinary appeal; they lie at the cutting edge of research; they are complex, sometimes controversial, and they require attention from multiple disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Typically each is the centre of attention for one academic year, enabling an intense short-term focus on urgent issues, while also providing a platform for longer -term research and creative development. Each theme is interpreted in its broadest sense, scientifically, symbolically, legally, philosophically, artistically, politically, economically and sociologically.


The focal point of the IAS is a programme of work associated with, but not exclusive to, its annual research theme. At its core lies a fellowship programme in which two cohorts of up to ten world-class individuals are invited to spend three months at the IAS. During their stay, Fellows advance their own research, engage collaboratively with departments and colleges, deliver public lectures and seminars, and, above all, join an international community of researchers to address the theme selected for that year. They are invited to contribute to a rich programme of conferences, workshops, and seminars organised by colleagues at Durham to address different aspects of the theme. All contribute to the IAS’s web-based journal ‘Insights’, which reflects the cutting-edge research developed at the Institute. Their biographies and plans are summarised in this programme.


In supporting the Time theme, the aim is to stimulate thinking. We live in an age acutely conscious of time: its passing and acceleration, its measurement and regulation, its evolutionary dynamic, its future promise, its own timing. Through this


consciousness seems to run a thread of compulsion – a compulsion to master the clockwork of time, understand its rhythms, put it to most efficient use, direct its flow , grasp its provenance. Time has taken on the property of a thing or process that can be grasped and made to work in certain ways. But what exactly is time, and does it have the properties we think it has? What meanings of time have come to prevail in our age, and how do they shape human endeavour , being and aspiration? How does the arrow of time fly, and how has its flight been tracked in the past? Is it possible to imagine a future organised without clock-time as anything other than as a train that is either on track or derailed?


The body of work associated with the theme will address issues such as these and those of major contemporary and intellectual interest. Highlights in this programme include a public lecture series that aims to chart the cultural inflection of time in a variety of poetic and artistic forms. A one-day international workshop on the subject of time in the theological, scientific and medical writings of the Early and Central medieval periods will examine hexaemeral writing in the medieval tradition. A further lecture series will consider the major W estern calendrical structures and landmarks, (such as the Roman calendar, Christmas, and Easter), regional interest (e.g. the Venerable Bede’s contribution to time-reckoning), as well as related and alternative models (e.g. Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Chinese festivals). A seminar series will seek to attain a new interdisciplinary understanding of narration, and narrative time. A one-day workshop will examine human settlement and environmental change during the last million years of the Quaternary period (covering the Holocene and Pleistocene periods). A second seminar series will build on and extend a strand of last year’s Futures II theme which centred on the themes of time, art and memory . This follow-on series will focus on the extraordinary efflorescence of cultural activity in the central medieval period, 1000-1250, and also on the equally extraordinary cultural pre-conditions of Northumbrian society in the seventh century. Additional workshops seek to explore new approaches to the embodied experience of time and further understanding of everyday experiences of time: from the mundane to the exceptional, the repetitive to the disruptive, the still to the wonder -filled. Other events will examine a number of fundamental issues surrounding the nature of space time and the structure of quantized symmetry in string theory.


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