Professor Don Howard (Philosophy and HPS) has just received an extraordinary award from the Schiffnarr Foundation, an exclusive organization that is careful to select only those recipients who precisely match its august mission. Prof Howard writes:
"It is with great excitement that I share the happy news that the Schiffnarr Foundation, located in Zurich, Switzerland, has awarded me a very generous, ten-million dollar grant to fund a five-year project to explore that social, cultural, political, religious, intellectual, and human milieu within which Albert Einstein grew to maturity and took the first steps in what was to be a spectacular and transformative scientific career. The formal name is the Ante Annum Mirabilem Project, since it covers the period up to 1905, Einstein’s impressive annus mirabilis. Inspired by works such as Michael Gordin’s recent Einstein in Bohemia, Carl Seelig’s gem of a book, Einstein und die Schweiz, and Lewis Feuer’s portrait of Einstein’s university years in Zurich in Einstein and the Generations of Science, the project will take a deep dive into the cultural and political movements of Zurich in that period, the café culture of Zurich, the musical milieu, the somewhat loose mores of the bohemian student, artistic, and literary communities in Zurich, and the lives and work of his friends, like Marcel Grossmann, Michele Besso, and Friedrich Adler (son of the co-founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and assassin of the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Sturgkh in 1916), his teachers, such as Jost Winteler, Heinrich Friedrich Weber, and August Stadler (who was Hermann Cohen’s first Ph.D. student at Marburg), and his mentor and benefactor, the banker and leader of the Swiss Ethical Culture Society, Gustav Maier. That some of this ground has already been covered by researchers connected with the Einstein Papers Project, means only that we have firm ground on which to build.
You may not have heard of the Schiffnarr Foundation, the work of which has hitherto been exclusively philanthropic. But Germinal Schiffnarr, the Swiss industrialist who established it in 1950, was intensely proud of the fact that Einstein was shaped in so many important ways by his Zurich experience, so the board of directors, wishing to honor what the founder treasured, decided to salute what he so valued by funding this project. You can learn more about the history and work of the foundation on its website: www.schniffnar.org.
A formal announcement from the foundation will be released soon, as will calls for applications for pre- and post-doctoral fellowships, research fellowships, and the establishment of working groups at several collaborating institutions. We will also be recruiting assistant directors of the project who will be responsible for overseeing separate facets of the larger enterprise. But I am eager to get an early start on identifying people who might want to affiliate with the project, so, if you are interested please be in touch, and share the news with your friends, colleagues, and students. But do be aware of the fact that Swiss law stipulates that salaries originating from Swiss sources can only be paid into numbered Swiss bank accounts, and recent US anti-terrorism legislation requires the reporting to US authorities of all bank transactions valued at more than $10,000 into and out of US banks. So it is a regrettable, but unavoidable consequence that anyone who affiliates with the project will be under regular US security surveillance. For my part, I think that this only makes the project more exciting!"
Congratulations Don! This award could not have come on a more auspicious day.
Originally published by at reilly.nd.edu on April 01, 2022.