BERLIN—May 7, 2025—The American Academy in Berlin is pleased to announce the Berlin Prize recipients for the 2025-26 academic year. The Berlin Prize is awarded annually to US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition.

The Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows also work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage with German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the American Academy’s public program.

We look forward to welcoming the 2025-26 Class of Fellows to the Hans Arnhold Center next academic year. Congratulations!

Class of Fall 2025

Karen Feldman
Professor of German Studies, University of California, Berkeley
The Rhetoric of Moralizing: On Affect, Epistemology, and “Knowing Better”

Karen Feldman’s Academy book project considers the rhetorical, epistemic, and affective dimensions of moralizing, which she describes as “an appeal to right principles and the certainty of one’s own judgment, couched in a typically high-handed affective mode.” The project will consist of a series of essays on Western philosophical approaches to moralizing, and on contemporary treatments of moralizing within literary studies, focusing on such canonical and recent texts as Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory, Eve Sedgewick’s “Paranoid Reading,” and Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique.

Jacob S. Hacker
Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, Yale University
The Progressive Dilemma: The Misunderstood Present and Contested Future of America’s Transformed Democratic Party

The American Democratic Party is arguably the most robust center-left party in the rich world. Yet it faces obstacles to winning and using power, including internal diversity, geographic disadvantages, and systemic opposition. In his Academy book project, Jacob S. Hacker draws on a mix of original opinion surveys, political-economic data, qualitative case studies, and interviews to assess the risks and opportunities for the party as it seeks to defend and strengthen American democracy while also succeeding as a major party.

Oona Hathaway
Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale Law School
War Unbound

In the years since 9/11, a series of wars—from the US-led “war on terror” to the Syrian civil war to Russia’s war in Ukraine to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza—have each led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. This has happened despite states’ universal acceptance of laws that that promise to protect civilians from the worst violence of war. Oona Hathaway’s Academy book project, War Unbound, examines how a shift in the nature of war, from fewer wars between states (which were outlawed in the UN Charter) to more frequent wars between states and non-state actors (which were not), has pushed international humanitarian law to the breaking point. She asks: Can the postwar project of containing war through law be revived? 

William Hitchcock
James Madison Professor of History, University of Virginia
A Shadow over the World: American Democracy in the Age of Fascism, 1922-1941

Contrary to the belief that Americans ignored fascism until the start of World War II, many were deeply engaged in debates about its threat—and, for some, its appeal—from Mussolini’s rise in 1922 to US entry into the war in 1941. In A Shadow over the World, William Hitchcock reveals how various American groups, including Jews, African Americans, and internationalists, raised early warnings, and how their concerns grew during conflicts in places like Ethiopia, Spain, and China. Ultimately, Hitchcock focuses on President Franklin Roosevelt’s historic argument: if American democracy was to survive, it must confront the threat of fascism as a matter of global security. This stance guided the United States into war and then shaped the global postwar order.

Jamaica Kincaid
Novelist; Professor Emerita of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
What Cassandra, Daughter of Potter Not Priam, Said

Jamaica Kincaid’s new novel concerns the allegorical Cassandra, whom she calls “the tenth daughter of Memory.” Memory has nine other known daughters, all of whom make up the foundation of civilization—unknown and unseen, ephemeral yet everlasting. Cassandra, Kincaid notes, does not so much write with a pen but with her tongue, which her detractors wish to remove. And why? Because they feel themselves wronged by Cassandra’s unquenchable drive to say things as they are: true.

Alexandra Kleeman
Novelist; Associate Professor, Literatures in English, Cornell University
The Taxon Cycle

The Taxon Cycle is a quasi-utopian novel, written in five parts, about the rise and fall of money. Each part of Kleeman’s new novel explores a distinct site at which the utility and valuation of money is in flux, and could be uprooted: Oceania, Okinawa, Manhattan, and the island of Fårö, as well as a futuristic space colony off-planet. The novel also considers the island as a site where nature sets into motion “evolutionary experiments” and asks what other types of relationships between life and necessity could exist in the absence of capitalism. By exploring such transitional moments, Kleeman offers a sense of the horizons of our monetary systems, and gestures toward other shapes our economies could take.

Elizabeth Kolbert
Staff Writer, The New Yorker
Under the Glacier: How Ice Shaped Our World and Will Determine Its Future

The two and a half trillion tons of CO2 people have pumped into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution have changed the planet in ways that become apparent nearly every day. The future depends on how humanity reacts to global warming, but also upon how the Earth reacts. In her Academy book project, Elizabeth Kolbert tells the story of ice ages past in a way that conveys the importance of feedbacks to the future. She weaves natural history and the history of science with contemporary research to highlight the pertinence of ice ages to our warming world.

Nora Krug
Writer; Illustrator; Associate Professor of Illustration, Parsons School of Design/The New School
Revenge 

Nora Krug’s new book, Revenge, will be a collection of visual narratives based on archival research and interviews on the subject of revenge and WWII—from Holocaust survivors to war victims and partisans in Poland, to Wehrmacht soldiers committing atrocities. She looks at revenge from a variety of perspectives: symbolic vs. enacted; impulsively vs. morally restorative; as a transition from war to peace. Ultimately, Krug raises questions as timeless as they are pertinent: Is revenge justified? Is forgiveness truly possible? Can we ever overcome the trauma of the past and move towards a more peaceful future?

Candice Lin
Interdisciplinary Artist; Associate Professor of Art, University of California, Los Angeles
New Work

While in Berlin, Candice Lin will pursue artistic research into Asian timekeeping devices that measure and categorize time—the lunar calendar, incense clocks, and water clocks—to create a new sculptural installation for exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, in London, and Gallery Hyundai, in Seoul. She will also be continuing research into human-and-non-human animal relations for a new animation for the Gallery Hyundai exhibition.

Ross Perlin
Co-Director, Endangered Language Alliance
The Jesus Film: On Universal Translation, Endangered Languages, and Holy Writ in the Age of AI

The most translated and watched film in history is not a Hollywood blockbuster or sacred text, but the 1979 movie JESUS: The Film, created by John Heyman and backed by American evangelicals. Though initially a flop, it became a global missionary tool, translated into over 2,000 languages and viewed billions of times, now even used by tech giants to train AI on rare languages. In his Academy book project, Ross Perlin explores the film’s extraordinary reach, its translators, and its role as a unique linguistic and cultural phenomenon that reshapes the history of translation and language in the age of AI.

Chloe Thurston
Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern university
An Investor’s Republic: The Politics of Assets and Wealth in the United States

Beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, Americans began to invest in increasing numbers in the stock market and also became more inclined to view their homes and educational credentials as investments that would generate wealth. Chloe Thurston’s Academy book project An Investor’s Republic traces the rise of an investment-oriented political culture in the US and the political, regulatory, and institutional transformations that occurred to bring this about. In doing so, Thurston also examines how policymakers, business leaders, and civil rights leaders coalesced around asset building as a way to address failed promises of full economic citizenship emerging in the New Deal, and how political parties converged to the idea that promoting investment could serve their own conflicting goals.

Justin Torres
Novelist; Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles
The Rule of Three

Justin Torres’s third novel, The Rule of Three, draws on the popular idiom from a variety of fables and folk tales, most notably in the Brothers Grimm. He tells the story of three bachelor brothers, all in their forties, in a shared moment of crisis.The action of the novel takes place over an extremely constricted timespan and explores themes of homelessness, precarity, and class conflict as well as the role of triadic relations in structuring social life.

Saul Zaritt
Assistant Professor of Yiddish Language and Ashkenazic Culture, The Ohio State University
Yiddish Trash: A History of Popular Culture 

Yiddish Trash is a study of popular Yiddish fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analyzing what was commonly disparaged as shund (trash) and “women’s reading,” Saul Zaritt’s book project tells the story of Yiddish culture through its dime novels, short stories, and romances. He combines traditional scholarship, translation, and the digital humanities to bring to light the thousands of “pulp” texts—published across the global diaspora of Ashkenazi Jewry as cheap pamphlets or serialized in newspapers—that were the daily pleasure of millions of Yiddish readers.

Class of Spring 2026

Anya Bernstein
Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University
Pleistocene Park: Extinction and Eternity in the Russian Arctic

Anja Bernstein’s Academy book project explores a transnational quest to combat climate change through radical ecological restoration and biotechnology. Centered on Pleistocene Park—a rewilding project in Arctic Siberia aimed at slowing permafrost thaw—it also follows American collaborators working to “resurrect” extinct species through genetic engineering. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork spanning from the Russian Arctic to biotech labs in the United States, the book offers an intimate portrait of how scientists are working to remake the future—while also rethinking the boundaries of life, death, nature, and time itself.

Dawoud Bey
Photographer, Artist, Educator
Landscapes of Memory: Berlin

The land holds memories. For the past decade, Dawoud Bey has been engaged in making work that engages the American landscape and the Black presence that has inhabited those sites, and whose presence continues to linger. His work seeks to create a liminal space where the past and present intermingle provocatively.

Rachel Cohen
Professor of Practice in the Arts, The University of Chicago
Time in Pieces: Artists at Work

During her time in Berlin, Rachel Cohen will be researching and writing for Time in Pieces: Artists at Work, a book of linked essays about artists working with the new experiences of time and technology in their eras. In one essay, for example, to think about the time of childhood, with its interruption, repetition, and invention, the anchor is Paula Modersohn-Becker’s radical drawings of children. This leads to her correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke and Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne and to Paul Cézanne’s paintings of his son, as well as to Mary Cassatt’s experiments with different etching states as she looks back to the influence of Kitigawa Utamaro’s prints of children. This material then leaps forward to contemporary artist Jenny Holzer’s digital-loop installation for Modersohn-Becker, Mother and Child. Each essay in the book explores a strand of four or five artists—some laboring collaboratively near one another, others at a far remove, across continents and through two hundred years of history—to reflect on changing experiences of work, modernity, technology, and time.

Hugh Eakin
Senior Editor, Foreign Affairs
“Genocide by Other Means”: Cultural Destruction and Why It Matters

Genocide by Other Means will explore the deep interplay between acts of cultural destruction and actual mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the Fascist and Communist regimes of the twentieth century to China, Russia, Iran, and other illiberal regimes today, the ability to control art, architecture, and language has been a crucial means of building power—but also a way to delegitimize and even erase the traces of threatening groups and ideologies. In exposing this dynamic, Hugh Eakin’s project will tell the stories of individuals who defied the regimes they served to prevent cultural erasure, often at great personal risk.

Stephen Holmes
Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Demography, Identity, and Putin’s War

In his Academy project, Stephen Holmes examines how dramatically falling birthrates have been among the most important drivers behind both Putin’s murderous war on Ukraine and anti-immigrant populism in Europe and the United States. Both have their roots in weakened and endangered cultural identities that are foundering in a world destabilized by population decline and extinction anxiety. These positions fundamentally agree, Holmes argues, that the principal danger facing their societies stems from declining birthrates among historically dominant populations.

Sabrina Karim
Associate Professor of Government, Cornell University
Pockets of Restraint in Violent Security Forces

In July 2024, a student-led social movement toppled the government of Bangladesh despite brutal repression by the security forces. Yet, upon closer examination of the government-ordered repression, not all security forces used violence against civilians—some units did, while others did not, and the military was more restrained than the operational units of the police. The Bangladesh case is not an anomaly. In this project, Sabrina Karim looks around the world for pockets of restraint emerge among individual police officers, military soldiers, and various units. She argues that security forces often differ in their policies on the use of force, their preferences regarding excessive violence, and their everyday responses to unfolding events. Karim’s project explores when and why pockets of restraint emerge at the individual, unit, and country levels.

Maaza Mengiste
Novelist; Essayist; Professor of English, Wesleyan University
A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths

Set in Berlin in the interwar years, Maaza Mengiste’s novel-in-progress, “A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths,” follows Milli, a Black German cabaret performer and former muse to some of Germany’s most celebrated avant garde artists, during the rise of the Nazi regime. As the Nazis search desperately for one particular portrait of her for an upcoming exhibition of “degenerate” art, Milli has to find a way to maneuver through an increasingly frightening and restrictive world, and keep those around her safe.

Derek Penslar
William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History, Harvard University
The War for Palestine, 1947-1949: A Global History

In his Academy book project, Derek Penslar examines global reactions to the 1948 Palestine War, highlighting how international politics and public opinion were deeply shaped by cultural, historical, and religious ties to the region. He shows that the United Nations’ involvement drew member states into the conflict in complex ways, with varying responses based on national interests and perspectives. While covering global reactions, the book focuses particularly on Europe, especially Germany, whose conflicted stance on Israel’s founding—shaped by the Holocaust—receives special attention.