Assistant Professor Ayesha Omer, from the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the School of Social Science for the 2025-26 academic year. This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.
During her stay, Dr. Ayesha Omer will complete her book manuscript, Networks of Dust: Media Technologies and Environments along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is an ethnography of Chinese energy, communications and logistics infrastructures in Pakistan’s indigenous borderlands, as part of China’s global Belt and Road Initiative. Across this work, Dr. Omer explores dust as the material residue and mediation of infrastructural intervention in indigenous environments and argues that dust is the counter-imaginary of global connection.
Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty include, Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, John von Neumann, Hetty Goldman, George Kennan and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Located in Princeton, NJ, the Institute for Advanced Study was established in 1930. Today, research at IAS is conducted across four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Science—to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
Among past and present scholars, there have been 37 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 24 of the 28 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge and Pulitzer Prizes.