USIAS Annual Symposium 2025
The Annual Symposium of the University of Strasbourg’s Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS) was held on 20 November 2025 at the Alsace Inter-University House for the Social Sciences and Humanities (MISHA), with a keynote from Professor Thomas Römer of the Collège de France, Paris.
Professor Frédérique Berrod, President of the University of Strasbourg, opened the symposium. Her welcome speech underlined the importance of academic freedom, especially in these challenging times where so many things have become politicized. In relation to this, Professor Berrod evoked the key role of USIAS, which provides researchers with intellectual freedom to step off the beaten track, to follow their curiosity and venture in new directions. She welcomed the new leadership of USIAS, director Monica Manolescu and co-director Thomas Baumert, as part of a fresh generation taking the helm of the institute.
Professors Manolescu and Baumert subsequently presented USIAS’ new 2025 Fellows and its most recent chairs. Professor Roland Recht, USIAS Chair of Art Historiography then introduced the keynote speaker of this year’s symposium, Professor Thomas Römer who holds the Chair of “The Hebrew Bible and its contexts" at the Collège de France, and warmly welcomed him before giving him the floor.
In a comprehensive and descriptive lecture, Professor Römer discussed the invention of monotheism which emerged in the historical and cultural context of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (587 BCE), with one real God who operated at a more fundamental level than all other gods that were worshipped in various societies in those times.
Photos: 1. Monica Manolescu and Thomas Baumert; 2. Frédérique Berrod; 3. Thomas Römer; 4. Roland Recht and Thomas Römer
