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The National Gallery in the New Century: The Mellon Legacy
Marina Kellen French, a trustee of the American Academy, introduced the distinguished visitor of her namesake, Earl A. Powell, III, director of the National Gallery of Art. An expert in 19th and 20th European and American art, Powell (or "Rusty," his nickname) has held the esteemed position since 1992, subsequent to positions at the University of Texas and his directorship of the Los...
read more >>On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance
Artist Leslie Hewitt's photographs are somewhat like mis en abymes, or, as the French writer Andre Gide believed, “self-reflexive embeddings,” which are achieved by being scenes within scenes. Her aesthetic inquiries have taken her from the physical space of sculpture, through the world of photography, to the ethereal yet somehow very present world of film.
Hewitt...
read more >>The Global Condition in the Long Twentieth Century
Weltinnenpolitik. This is a German word that attempts to capture how we deal with a condition in which everybody is irreversibly linked, for good and bad, with everybody else. In other words, the world's domestic policy. This is also the condition we have come to call, since the 1980s, "globalization," and it was the topic of a subtle and compelling joint lecture by fellows...
read more >>A Travelling Man’s America
It is not often that an American literary legend strolls through the doors of the American Academy, particularly one who has made over thirty appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, penned countless articles for the New Yorker, The Nation, and Time over forty years, made a name as one of America's most beloved food writers, and who remains, of course, the...
read more >>A Musical Portrait of Annie Gosfield
Later into the chilled evening of March 21, Berlin's cult club Berghain -- located in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin and often dubbed the world capital of techno music -- was the scene for composer Annie Gosfield's sound-breaking Academy concert, which saw roughly 300 guests packed into a room which usually seats 200 (the club itself holds 1500), surrounded by a state-of-the-art audio...
read more >>The Globalization of Clean Energy Technologies
Even though energy technology development and commercialization were originally undertaken for the national scale, they indeed no longer occur--like climate change itself-- within one single country. Rather, the energy sector has become highly globalized, with firms and countries acquiring and selling technologies all over the world. Yet there are hindrances to its wider proliferation on the...
read more >>Breitenau: The Workhouse Project
The visitors from the big cities remark on how beautiful it is. And it's true that the Benedictines had a knack for choosing the finest locations for their monastaries. And this one, too, sitting alongside the long river Fulda, amid verdant meadow, its large buildings nestled in alongside the smaller village houses, farms, and woods, makes a good impression. Slowly, Ines shakes her head....
read more >>Redefining German Health Care: Moving to a Value-Based System
A hot topic in the United States and in Europe, certainly a topic that divides: Health care. Harvard University Business School professor Michael Porter’s new book, Redefining German Health Care: Moving to a Value-Based System (co-authored by Clemens Guth, Springer 2012), lays out an action agenda to...
read more >>In Celebration of Reri Grist’s 80th Birthday: A Unique Transatlantic Operatic Career
After Leonard Bernstein cast Reri Grist in the première of West Side Story, she found herself catapulted into stardom on opera stages throughout Europe and America. A regular at the Salzburg Festival, Grist's domination of the lyric and coloratura Fach in Strauss and Mozart signaled a breakthrough for African-American singers. Younger generations have since revered Grist for her...
read more >>The Fantastic
Karen Russell, the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction this spring, is well versed in weird things. Her first novel, Swamplandia!, features a cast of characters ranging from alligator wrestlers and a balding brown bear named Judy Garland, to a Bird Man specializing in buzzard removal and rioting...
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