American Academy in Berlin

Special Event
Gerhard Casper in Weimar und Jena
21. und 22. Februar: Ein Leben für die Universität – Von Hamburg nach Stanford

Gerhard Casper, der Präsident der American Academy in Berlin, spricht auf Einladung der Klassik Stiftung Weimar über sein Leben im Kontext der Universitätsidee Wilhelm von Humboldts, die Caspers Biographie maßgeblich geformt hat. Stanford University, deren Präsident Casper viele Jahre war, steht in der Humboldt’schen Tradition und ist zugleich eine der innovativsten Hochschulen der Welt. Weitere Informationen finden Sie in der Broschüre und unter www.klassik-stiftung.de
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Special Event
The American Academy in Berlin at the Brookings Institution
The Global Migration Crisis

Across the globe, government officials and human rights and humanitarian groups are confronting a migration event of the first magnitude. The social and political disarray in the Middle East has displaced millions of Near Eastern and North African migrants, who have made their way to neighboring countries and Europe. Central American and Mexican migration has tested the United States’ immigration system and become a major national issue. The same holds true with respect to people making their way to developed parts of East Asia and Australia.

The American Academy in Berlin and...
Architecture

Fellow Feature - Spyros Papapetros

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. He is the Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in the class of Spring 2016.

Watch him introduce his current project World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale.
The Berlin Prize
Welcoming an eclectic group of American scholars, artists, and writers
The Spring 2016 Fellows Presentation

The American Academy in Berlin welcomed its thirty-fifth class of fellows at the Hans Arnhold Center on the frosty evening of January 21, 2016. Attended by professionals from academia, journalism, the arts, business, and policy, and joined by a number of the Academy's trustees, supporters, and friends, the spring 2016 Fellows Presentation began with a conversation between esteemed press photographer Barbara Klemm and Academy president Gerhard Casper. Seated under a slide show of Klemm’s iconic work, they discussed her more than five decades of shooting for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Following their...
The Berlin Prize
From the Fall 2015 Berlin Journal
Alumni Publications

Each issue of the Berlin Journal includes a selected listing of recent alumni publications. Below are several new and noteworthy books that have appeared over the last half year. The list is not exhaustive, of course, so if you are alumni with a recent book or edited volume, please let us know by writing to the Berlin Journal’s managing editor, Johana Gallup, at jg@americanacademy.de.

Click here to read the full Berlin Journal online...

UPCOMING EVENTS

Tuesday, February 02

World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale

Berthold Leibinger Lecture

From Gottfried Semper’s essay on the cosmological character of bodily adornment (1856) to Aby Warburg’s ethnographic research on pottery ornamentation in the North-American Pueblos (1895-6), late nineteenth-century histories of art and architecture appear increasingly preoccupied with a series of ostensibly marginal artifacts: architectural ornaments, bodily accessories, and small household or ritual implements. »

Thursday, February 04

Fate Is Knocking on the Door – Soheil Nasseri Plays Beethoven’s Fifth

American Academy Concert

Berlin-based pianist Soheil Nasseri is a prolific recitalist and gifted interpreter of works ranging from Beethoven and Rachmaninov to premières by contemporary composers. The 38-year-old California native has performed in venues from the New York Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall to Tokyo's Musashino Center and Palermo's Teatro Massimo. The New York Times has called him “consistently interesting… consistently thoughtful… filled with character.” »

Tuesday, February 09

Security, a Roman Metaphor

Dirk Ippen Lecture

Security and secure borders preoccupy current public debates. But do we know what security means? Securitas first occurs in Cicero meaning "tranquility," in a strictly psychological sense. A century later the "security of the Roman Empire" had become a political slogan. Recognition of the concept’s origins in the collapse of the Roman Republic helps to clarify its potential for ideological manipulation. Ancient philosophy makes the blessed life, humanity’s highest aspiration, dependent on peace of mind. »

Thursday, February 25

War, Modernity, and Transformation in Imperial Ethiopia

Ellen Maria Gorrissen Lecture

Teferi Makonnen’s 1916 rise to power and ascension to the Ethiopian throne, in 1930, as Emperor Haile Selassie, and subsequent confrontation with Italy, in 1935, had dramatic consequences for the country’s future. Filmmaker Yemane Demissie’s forthcoming social-history documentary series, The Quantum Leapers: Ethiopia 1916-1975, undertakes the monumental task of configuring the myriad narratives and reflections culled from more than 300 individual interviews concerning Ethiopia’s twentieth-century experience. »

VIDEOS OF PAST EVENTS

Fellow Feature - Spyros Papapetros

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. He is the Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in the class of Spring 2016. Watch him introduce his current project World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale.
Presentation of the Spring 2016 Class of Fellows

The American Academy in Berlin welcomed its thirty-fifth class of fellows at the Hans Arnhold Center on the frosty evening of January 21, 2016. Attended by professionals from academia, journalism, the arts, business, and policy, and joined by a number of the Academy's trustees, supporters, and friends, the spring 2016 Fellows Presentation began with a conversation between esteemed press photographer Barbara Klemm and Academy president Gerhard Casper. Seated under a slide show of Klemm’s...
Wendy Doniger: Nature and Culture in the Kamasutra

The Kamasutra, composed in the third century CE, is the world’s most famous textbook of erotic love. For its time, it was astonishingly sophisticated and, even today, there is nothing like it. Yet it is all but ignored as a serious work in its country of origin—sometimes taken as a matter of national shame rather than pride—and in the rest of the world it is a source of amused amazement, inspiring magazine articles that offer "mattress-quaking sex styles" such as...
Moishe Postone: Capitalism, Temporality, and the Crisis of Labor

The current crisis has laid bare the contradictory and shaky character of contemporary capitalism. Yet the essentially inchoate responses to the crisis have dramatically revealed the absence of a robust conceptualization of post-capitalist society and, by implication, of a robust critique of capital. One result has been the continued hegemony of neoliberal discourses and policies. Moishe Postone seeks to fundamentally rethink the core categories of Marx’s critique of political economy in...
Elliott Sharp: Current Strategies for Composition and Performance

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp uses a wide variety of strategies to compose and perform music. His recent string quartet Tranzience is traditionally notated, but makes use of extended techniques and alternative bow materials. The score to his work Sylva Sylvarum was created by processing notation with graphic editing software in the same manner that the composer would process the sound of instruments: modulating, filtering, layering, inverting, distorting, sequencing. Over 250...
Methlabs and Late Industrial Alchemy in Rural Missouri

In this lecture, anthropologist and Bosch Public Policy Fellow Jason Pine looks at small-scale methamphetamine manufacture in rural Missouri to ask how meth cooking and consumption are used to enhance or “get more life.” He explains the fieldwork he conducted among meth cooks, narcotic agents, judges, parole officers, physicians, pastors, and a St. Louis pharmaceutical laboratory. He also traces the contours of alternative biotechno-ecologies, where “rogue” consumers...
Andrea Köhler: Shame and Shamelessness in the Age of New Media

Shame and shaming have been powerful tools since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, but with the rise of social media the brutality of shaming has reached a cultural boiling point. While mistaken as a medium for social justice, where the powerless are given a voice, cyber-mobbing often takes on the characteristics of medieval punishment. In this lecture, Andrea Köhler, the New York correspondent of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, discusses how shamers can wreak havoc on the lives of those...
Jared Cohen: Shifting Power Dynamics in the New Digital Age

While the world witnesses unprecedented growth of citizen empowerment, the same geopolitical challenges that have plagued our world for centuries—terrorism, war, repression, sectarian violence—are spilling over into the digital domain in ways unique and without precedent. The founder and director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, discusses how from the Great Firewall of China to Russia’s troll armies, from the Syrian Electronic Army to ISIS’s propaganda machine, states and...
Philip Kitcher: The Possibility of Social Progress

In this lecture, philosopher Philip Kitcher explores the concept of social progress by proposing that we should think of progress pragmatically, in terms of overcoming problems rather than as directed towards some ideal state. Following John Dewey, he sees these problems as arising from changes in the environment- physical, social, and cultural- which undermine once adaptive institutions and patterns of behavior. Partial solutions to these problems sometimes require a fundamental rethinking of...