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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...
read more >>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...
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