Video & Audio

In this lecture, Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow Nathanial Levtow examines the phenomenon of text destruction from the beginning of writing to the formation of the Bible.

In the 2015 Kurt Viermetz Lecture on May 28, economist Lawrence H. Summers drew on a recent international report he co-chaired on inclusive prosperity to discuss the ways in which the global economy has changed over the last generation and how policies need to respond.

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp uses a wide variety of strategies to compose and perform music. In this lecture, Sharp discusses his compositions and the formal ideas at play in his improvisation, concluding with a brief improvised performance on his eight-string electroacoustic guitarbass.

Thomas L. Friedman delivered the Stephen M. Kellen Lecture at the American Academy in Berlin on Wednesday, April 22, 2015. He spoke about our lives being shaped more than ever by these three changes: digital, geo-economical, and ecological. How will civilizations best adapt to these changes and cushion their worst effects?

Holtzbrinck Fellow William Uricchio has sought to launch a critical discourse on the cultural importance of algorithms and their impact on present-day society.

Foreign Policy Forum lecturer and Academy alumna Esra Özyürek spoke about her new book, Being German, Becoming Muslim (Princeton, December 2014).

In this lecture, “Why Genocide? The Fate of the Armenians and Assyrians at the End of the Ottoman Empire,” historian Ronald Suny details how, in February 1915, the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire ordered the deportations and killings of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians.

Christopher D. Johnson stresses that shifts in encyclopedism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to cultivate the modern encyclopedic impulse, evidenced by the role encyclopedism has played in the history of the novel as well as the work of Francis Bacon and the Encyclopédie.

Artist Sanford Biggers incorporates icons and rites ranging from mandalas and slave quilts to hip hop and YouTube music culture, Biggers's works connect African spiritualism, Buddhist rituals, and African-American urban culture.

Daimler Fellow Bruce Ackerman identifies three sets of actors that play key roles in different forms of constitutional legitimation: revolutionary outsiders, established insiders, and a combination of established insiders and political elites previously excluded from the system.