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The 2012-2013 Class of Berlin Prize Fellows
The American Academy in Berlin is proud to announce the twenty-four outstanding scholars, writers, artists, and policy experts that have been chosen by an independent selection committee to be in residence at the Academy for the 2012-2013 academic year. The Berlin Prize includes a monthly stipend, partial board, and residence at the Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center. Most...
read more >>The Workhouse: Room 2
The American Academy in Berlin is pleased to announce that Avery F. Gordon Professor of Sociology at University of California Santa Barbara and the Academy’s Spring 2012 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow, together with Berlin-based artist Ines Schaber, will participate in dOCUMENTA(13). Their installation The Workhouse: Room...
read more >>Civic Engagement through Urban Intervention: The BMW Guggenheim Lab
On the evening of May 31 an expert panel gathered around the subject of public archictecture and civic engagement under the aegis of the BMW Guggenheim Lab at the American Academy in Berlin. Architects Wilfried Wang and Frank Barkow joined architectural historian Andres Lepik, curator Maria Nicanor, and sociologist Cordelia Polinna for an engaging foray into the ways and means the built...
read more >>A Moving and Historic Celebration of George P. Shultz
On the evening of May 24 the American Academy in Berlin welcomed over 300 distinguished guests at the 2012 Henry A. Kissinger Prize ceremony, held in the Weltsaal of the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt), to celebrate the extraordinary lifetime achievements of United States former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. The former MIT and University of Chicago economics professor and Dean...
read more >>Anchorman Jim Clancy at the Hans Arnhold Center
A dinner in honor of Jim Clancy, anchorman for CNN International and host of "The Brief," was held at the American Academy in Berlin on May 23 in preparation for CNN's joint coverage with RTL, NTV, Die Welt, the American Academy in Berlin, and Bertelsmann of the 2012 US Presidential Election, in November. Attending the dinner were Academy chairman A. Michael Hoffman,...
read more >>"Dürer as A Boy" at the German National Museum
A nineteenth-century sculpture believed to have vanished during the Second World War was rediscovered on the grounds of the American Academy in Berlin. The discovery of the marble sculpture's provenance was made by art historian Jeffrey Chipps Smith, of the University of Texas at Austin, when he was the Anna-Maria...
read more >>Law in the Time of Party Rule: Humboldt University’s Law Faculty Under Socialism
“Lawyers make bad Christians,” Martin Luther once said (“Juristen – böse Christen”). Why? Lawyers are too contrary, too skeptical, too willing to argue either side of any controversy in order to win. They have no talent for unquestioning faith, no convictions, no allegiance. This same rationale might explain, says Inga Markovits, the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow...
read more >>How to Do Things with the Ordinary
Richard Deming, a poet and theorist at Yale University whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture, thinks that the ordinary has things to teach us about belief and skepticism, and about hope and despair, about our own lives as reflected in the lives of others -- if we pay attention. "The everyday," he says, "seeks to reveal and engage the...
read more >>“You Can Always Count on a Murderer for a Fancy Prose Style” – On Nabokov’s Lolita
On April 19, Leland de la Durantaye, the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard University, spoke about Vladimir Nabokov's scandalous novel Lolita, published in 1955. Nabokov was fifty-six at the time; it was his twelfth novel, his third in English, and "the finest he would ever write, amongst the finest ever written," Durantaye said. Since its...
read more >>The Steam-Powered Gardens of Potsdam and Berlin: Projecting Industrial Culture into the Landscape
There were two distinct parts to M. Norton Wise's talk on the steam-powered gardens of Potsdam and Berlin: one that covered the royal gardens around Potsdam from 1815 to 1850, and the second about Berlin's industrial growth during the second half the nineteenth century. Both play a role in the fascinating history of topiary aesthetics and industrialization of Berlin and its lush environs...
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