Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which promotes new ways of thinking about art, scholarship, and knowledge at Columbia’s Global Center in Paris, has received a $7.5 million grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
The funding from the foundation, which has been among the institute’s major donors since its launch in 2018, will support the institute’s fellowship program while endowing its directorship and a lecture series, Rendez-vous de l’Institut.
To date, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination has hosted more than forty yearlong fellowships that bring scholars and writers together in Paris to pursue their own work while participating in collaborations that foster artistic and intellectual innovation. The current cohort includes writers and translators from Greece, the UK, and France; filmmakers, composers, and photographers from Peru, the Philippines, and South Africa; and Columbia faculty working in law, philology, music, architectural history, and anthropology. In addition, the institute partnered with Columbia’s Harriman Institute and others to offer four residencies specifically for Ukrainian writers, journalists, and artists for the 2022–23 academic year.
“The Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s gift is transformational,” said Mark Mazower, a Columbia historian and the institute’s director. “It confirms the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in its core mission of bringing together the worlds of scholarship and the arts, while enabling us to enhance our international impact at a time when we need more than ever to find new ways of communicating ideas that matter.”
