Categories
The earliest recorded civilizations through the end of antiquity, from the first written records to roughly the fall of Rome.
Rendering a patient insensible to an operation and keeping them alive through it: anesthesia, pain management and intensive care.
The study of humanity in the round: culture, language, biology and the material past, held together by the comparative and ethnographic method.
Religious life as it is actually lived: ritual, myth, magic and the sacred, described from inside a community rather than from its doctrine.
Moral theory brought to bear on particular practices: medicine, research, business, war, the environment and the rest.
Linguistic method turned on practical language problems: teaching and testing, translation, policy, and communication in institutions.
Mathematics developed for use outside mathematics: modelling, approximation, and the analysis of the models that result.
Arabic as an object of study: the classical and standard written language, and the spoken varieties that differ sharply from it.
The human past read from what it left behind: excavation, artefacts, settlement and landscape, for the long stretch of it that no document covers.
The made environment as a subject: buildings and objects judged both as engineering and as form, and the history and theory of designing either.
Works of art in their time: attribution and period, style and iconography, patronage, and what a picture meant to the people who first saw it.
The study of systems that perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as reasoning and perception.
The study of the arts: painting, music, theatre, film, dance and literature as objects of scholarship -- their history, their forms, and what they are doing.
Life in the universe: how it began on Earth, what conditions could support it elsewhere, and how a search for it would be designed.
Measuring the positions and motions of celestial objects to the highest precision available. It is what fixes the reference frame every other observation is quoted against, and parallax measurement is what sets the distance scale.
The study of everything beyond the Earth: planets, stars, galaxies and the universe as a whole, and the instruments built to observe them.
Particle physics done with the universe as the source: cosmic rays, high-energy neutrinos, and the direct and indirect searches for dark matter.
The application of physics to celestial objects, from stars and galaxies to the structure of the universe.
The chemistry of the air: ozone, aerosols, greenhouse gases and the reactions that produce and destroy them.
The atmosphere as a physical and chemical system: its structure, its circulation, and the radiation passing through it.