Blog
At each and every Gruter Institute conference, we witness an extraordinary exchange of information, leading to new collaborations across disciplines – sometimes even the emergence of new disciplines or sub-disciplines (e.g. law and neuroscience). Relationships are formed and new collaborations are off to the races. It is thrilling to witness and yet, simultaneously, hard to track, as collaborators return to home institutions and quietly engage in the hard work of research and writing. This is a space to highlight some of the collaborations that have grown within our network. We hope these posts will continue a virtuous cycle of further collaboration!
Gruter Fellows’ Publications Garner National Media Attention
Recently, with the generous support of Gordon Getty, the Gruter Institute held two conferences on the Evolution of Kissing, the first at the Royal Society in
Gruter Fellow Owen Jones’s Upcoming Book Force of Nature Available of Preorder
New from Gruter Institute Fellow, Owen D. Jones, Professor of Law & Professor of Biology at Vanderbilt University, Force of Nature is an eye-opening exploration
KissCon II: The Evolution of Kissing and Adaptive Trade-Offs in Human Contact: Perspectives in Evolutionary Biology, Immunology, Human Behavior, and Implications for the Increasingly Isolated Digital Age
In March 2024, with the generous support of Gordon Getty, the Gruter Institute convened a group of evolutionary biologists, behavioral scientists, historians, economists, and legal thought
The First Kiss …? The Evidence From Ancient Mesopotamia
An exploration of the earliest documentation for romantic-sexual kissing.
Social Touch in Chimpanzee Life
Learn why social touch is at the core of social interaction in chimpanzees
Contact, Disgust, and The Law
What role does disgust play in the evolution of kissing behavior in humans?
A Note From Our Director, Monika Gruter Cheney
While I have served as Executive Director of the Gruter Institute for over 20 years, I began my career as an intellectual property lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati during the heyday of Silicon Valley’s great innovation boon. I loved the hands-on experience of helping entrepreneurs build new companies with exciting new technology. Yet what I was most deeply interested in was understanding how this extraordinary abundance of innovation could arise in the first place. Why here in California,
Get updates on Gruter’s blog posts and insightful work stemming from our Co-labs and Research Fellows.