BERLIN, May 11, 2026—The American Academy in Berlin is pleased to announce the Berlin Prize recipients for the 2026-27 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 work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the American Academy’s public program.

Fall 2026 

Andrea Bernstein
Journalist, Writer, Visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism
Princeton University
The Uses of Memory: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, My Parents, and Me   

At the Academy, Bernstein will work on The Uses of Memory: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, My Parents,and Me. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, part intellectual history, this inquiry will look at her own work covering US politics—from 9/11 through January 6, 2021, to our present moment—as it converged with the work of her parents, Richard J. and Carol L. Bernstein, scholars of Arendt and Benjamin, respectively. The Uses of Memory will use Bernstein’s journalistic tools and intellectual inheritance as a lens through which to understand how to hang on to truth and facts and memory and history in an ever more fragmented and hostile post-truth world.

William Burke-White  
Professor of Law, Carey Law School
University of Pennsylvania
Connectivity without Consensus: Recasting International Economic Law for a Fragmented World 

Watching many of the institutions that have held the post-World War II world order disintegrate, Burke-White asks, “Is international economic law still fit for its purpose”?  His Academy project argues that international economic law can adapt by focusing on procedural frameworks that regulate these actions, rather than seeking a return to shared goals. Through a four-phase analysis, the project examines the evolution of international law, maps emerging domestic restrictions, and explores decision-making processes that shape cross-border activity. The aim is to develop principles for international economic law that maintain global economic connectivity, even as consensus weakens. 

Aaron Cohen
Director of Programming Operations
New York Public Radio
Embrace Everything—The World of Gustav Mahler 

At the Academy, Cohen will use his extended access to the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic as well as proximity to German conductors and scholars to research, write, and produce the next three seasons (Seasons 5, 6 & 7) of his multi-award-winning podcast “Embrace Everything—The World of Gustav Mahler.” By placing Berlin’s voices at the center of this work, the project will both honor Mahler’s intellectual inheritance and bring Berlin’s cultural perspective to a global audience. Being in Berlin will provide philosophical depth and cultural resonance to the upcoming episodes and allow Cohen to root the project in a place directly connected to Mahler’s world.   

Sara Cwynar 
Artist
The Automaton 

Using a visually seductive way to engage with political topics (the future role of artificial intelligence in our lives, the impact of technology on material reality), Cwynar will create a research-based video essay and installation focused on the figure of the automaton throughout history. Automatons, defined as “moving mechanical devices made in imitation of human beings,” were early sites of artificial intelligence and of the idea that one could transfer our intelligence to something else. The project will also encompass the larger relationship between photography and capitalism—how these two “technologies” have developed in lockstep since the Industrial Revolution, one unable to exist without the other. The film will be heavily researched and based around a written script in the style of an essay film but will also use many of the experimental camera and animation techniques. 

Dagmar Herzog 
Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center
City University of New York
Fascism’s Lingering: Regime Change and Moral Reckoning 

Herzog will use a remarkable, heretofore unplumbed source base: transcripts of 121 focus-group conversations conducted in 1950-51 by the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main among Germans who had lived through the Third Reich and were prompted to discuss their opinions on Jews, guilt, Hitler, and democracy. No one has read this material in full since the 1950s, when Theodor Adorno and his team were stunned to find just how deeply and durably Nazi ideas had penetrated German minds. German culture and politics are at the heart of the story Herzog is aiming to unravel, and the historical problems she will be wrestling with are without question of transatlantic significance, not least at our current juncture.   

Alice Hill 
David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment
Council on Foreign Relations
Germany’s Climate Adaptation Plan: Lessons for the United States and the World 

At the Academy, Hill will conduct research on German climate adaptation policy as a “best practice” for adaptation planning for a new edition of Building a Resilient Tomorrow (Oxford, 2020), co-authored with Leonardo Martinez Diaz. The book surveys climate adaptation across multiple disciplines (law, engineering, geopolitics, finance, health, behavioral economics, data analytics) and emphasizes the need for planning to achieve successful adaptation. In the revised edition, Hill intends to include Germany as an example of ambitious adaptation planning, focusing on how it developed its 2024 Climate Adaptation Strategy, including binding targets and subnational resilience mandates. Highlighting Germany’s leadership on this front will offer a valuable counterpoint to declining US federal climate action and help inform future American decision-making.   

Ethan Kapstein 
Executive Director, Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University
The Future of European Security 

With many in Europe now doubting the American commitment to the continent’s security, Kapstein will spend his time at the American Academy examining ongoing European debates over defense policy, with the objective of developing an empirically grounded understanding of the direction Europe is likely to take given spending and acquisition priorities. What is the role of the European Union versus that of its member states? Should the EU try to replicate NATO with respect to military policy? Should the EU become the central node through which defense-related funding is mobilized and allocated? Or should defense remain primarily the realm of individual member-states, which continue to have independent strategic interests and priorities?   

Katie Kitamura 
Writer and Clinical Professor of Creative Writing
New York University
Untitled Novel 

Kitamura’s sixth novel begins with two women: an acclaimed Japanese film director’s widow and his former protégée. As they sift through the director’s emerging archive, they confront questions of legacy, memory and betrayal, as well the way personal biases create and inform institutional ones. At its heart, the novel is about national history and personal memory, and how the two intersect in art. How is the meaning of a work of art created? What kind of world does it call into being? And how does an artist live with the legacy of a work whose meaning was other than intended, and transforms over time? 

Ya-Wen Lei 
Professor of Sociology
Harvard University
Geopolitical Transplants: States, Firms, and the New Global Struggle for Technology  

Semiconductor manufacturing, a sector globally dominated by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, is arguably one of the most strategically important industries of the twenty-first century. Lei’s Academy project uses this field to consider geopolitical transplantation—a new form of cross-border industrial relocation driven primarily by national security imperatives and the pursuit of technological self-reliance, rather than market forces.  Using comparative studies of the United States, Japan, and Germany, the project examines how host governments and firms address institutional mismatches, infrastructural constraints, and cultural-organizational dissonance. 

Stephanie Leitch 
Professor of Art History
Florida State University
New Worlds, Recycled Images: The Imprint of the Copy in Early Modern Travel Narratives 

Leitch will use her time in Berlin to conduct research for a co-authored book: New Worlds, Recycled Images: The Imprint of the Copy in Early Modern Travel Narrative. Leitch uses Dürer’s famous rhinoceros print as an example of how inexpensive woodblocks were used (and misused) to drive the engine of early modern travel literature. This project promises to make a major contribution at the intersection of art, science, and technology in illuminating an era when knowledge was more holistically conceived, before our modern disciplinary formations existed as separate domains. Leitch will use the best-preserved collection of woodblock prints, the Derschau Sammlung, of the Kupferstitchkabinett in Berlin, as a primary source for her project. 

Carmen Machado 
Writer and Visiting Associate Professor, Iowa Writers’ Workshop
University of Iowa
Holy Shiver 

Carmen Machado’s debut novel, “Holy Shiver,” a third-person, multi-point-of-view piece set in the present and near future, is in the tradition of Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, and Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness. Centered around a group of lesbians as they navigate desire, relationships, sex, and obsession while their country slides from a pandemic into a surreal form of fascism, the protagonists are seeking something powerful but ineffable while trying to find a sense of purpose in their longing against a backdrop of homophobia, cultural decline, and political danger. 

Allison Stanger  
Middlebury Distinguished Endowed Professor
Middlebury College
Democracy in the Age of Cryptocurrency: A Global Governance Challenge 

Stanger’s Academy project comprises two main components: a historical analysis of fiat currency from ancient coins to modern crypto that reveals how monetary systems shape political institutions and the development of a global governance model for cryptocurrency based on citizens’ assemblies. Examining the democratic challenges posed by cryptocurrency adoption, particularly under the Trump administration’s embrace of crypto as policy, Stanger argues that current cryptocurrency implementation creates a “digital wild west,” where sophisticated actors profit while ordinary investors bear the risks, threatening democratic accountability

James van Dyke  
Associate Professor of Art History, School of Visual Studies
University of Missouri
Painting the Metropolis and Mental Life in Interwar Germany: The Dämonie of Otto Dix’s Realism 

Van Dyke will examine the German artist Otto Dix and Dämonie (uncanny, threatening power) in relationship to Nietzsche and Freud, to Simmel and Benjamin, and to the popular taste for horror. He will suggest that the fascinating, transgressive power of Dix’s work is not only a product of the morally and politically charged things and bodies he often depicted, but is also an effect of his engagement with the intensely psychological reality of modernity, in which the boundaries broke down between the objective and the subjective, the material and the mental, the living and the dead. 

Spring 2027 

Ayad Akhtar
Playwright and Novelist
Miller/Kazan 

At the Academy, Akhtar will work on a play built around the relationship between Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan. In April 1952, on the eve of Kazan’s testimony before HUAC, the two men walked through the woods near their homes in Connecticut. Kazan told Miller he intended to name names; Miller tried to dissuade him. When he couldn’t, Miller drove north to Salem, Massachusetts, to begin researching what became The Crucible. Kazan drove south to Washington and did as he promised. They barely spoke again for a decade. Through their subsequent work—Miller’s Crucible, Kazan’s On the Waterfront—each man mounted his defense, and an era’s moral argument played out through their art. Akhtar will investigate the ways artists use their work to construct versions of themselves that serve their needs, what that means about the messiness of the lives that create great art, and what is the relationship between an artist’s moral imagination and his capacity for self-deception? 

Rachel Bronson 
Senior Advisor
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists;
Lester Crown Nonresident Senior Fellow for Energy and Geopolitics
Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear Power, and Nonproliferation in the Middle East 

Drawing on her vast experience, Bronson’s Academy project, connecting artificial intelligence, nuclear power, and nuclear proliferation, is at the forefront of the broader discussions of the future of science, technology, and security in the Middle East. Last year’s announcement of Stargate UAE, a 5-gigawatt AI datacenter to be built in the United Arab Emirates, puts the world on notice that the conflict-prone Persian Gulf will serve as a major AI hub for years to come. The datacenter will consume an enormous amount of energy, and nuclear power will serve as base-load power for this new mega-project. The war in the Persian Gulf will further accelerate a global rush towards nuclear power. Long a leader in anti-nuclear movements, Berlin has grappled more intensely than most about the long-term risks and challenges associated with nuclear power, having shut down its own power plants as recently as 2023. Berlin’s recent decision to largely drop its resistance to supporting new nuclear power technology at the EU level and opening the door to considerations of small nuclear reactors demonstrates the intensity and urgency of the topic in Berlin. At a time when global cooperation and multilateral agreements are weakening around non-proliferation, the rapid expansion of nuclear energy is a real possibility, and operating nuclear power reactors have become targets in wartime, new approaches are needed to bolster nuclear non-proliferation controls. Bronson will offer a positive set of examples for reducing the risks of proliferation in the face of growing energy demands and increasing nuclear energy deployment across many new countries. 

Victor Dzau 
President
National Academy of Medicine
Transatlantic Collaboration in Technology Transfer 

Transatlantic Collaboration in Technology Transfer positions technology transfer as a societal mission, with implications for equity, governance, and public trust. In biomedicine, where gene therapies, mRNA platforms, and digital health are advancing at unprecedented speed, technology transfer determines not only which innovations reach the public, but also how fairness, trust, and responsibility in innovation are defined. By comparing approaches in the United States, Germany, and the European Union, Dzau will identify how different innovation ecosystems translate discovery into public benefit, and how equity and ethics can be embedded more systematically.

Emily Flake 
Cartoonist, Writer, and Illustrator
This Beast: A Travelogue of Middle Age 

Finding herself left cold by much of the conversation surrounding middle age, Flake will use her time at the Academy to write a book that explores the wilds of the middle, the trash-strewn empty lots of life where the weirdest weeds grow, and an examination of this beast and what we do with it: Do we try to shut it up? Do we let it die? Or do we actually let it speak? Using Flake’s signature graphic essay form, The Beast looks at the importance of laughter as a survival tool, one that renders a subject not less serious, but more bearable and aims to tear apart dismissive ideas of middle age by embracing the ungovernable monster that lives within her heart. 

Peter A. Hall 
Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies
Harvard University
The Political Economy of Opportunity 

Amidst a new technological revolution, occupations and life trajectories are shifting. To navigate the new terrain, people have to find new opportunities and the capabilities to secure them. Political economists must move beyond a longstanding focus on institutional structures, which are no longer stable, to think about agency and how it is constituted. In his Academy project, Hall asks: What types of policy regimes are most likely to provide opportunities for the widest array of citizens? How do people acquire the capabilities to take advantage of those opportunities? His emphasis is on how the developed political economies of Europe and the United States distribute opportunities via four mechanisms: access to tertiary education, geographic mobility, viable social networks, supportive social policies, and relevant firm strategies. He also takes an interdisciplinary approach to considering how the capabilities that people need to pursue those opportunities are distributed and generated.   

Michael Khodarkovsky
Professor of History
Loyola University Chicago
The Philosophy Ships: The Russian Intelligentsia in Exile, 1922-1950s

In September 1922, the Bolshevik government put some 200 “undesirable” intellectuals and their families aboard two ships departing from St. Petersburg to their exile in Germany, an event that has since become known as “the philosophy ships.” Among them were prominent philosophers, theologians, literary critics, writers, poets, and lawyers. Within two days, they found themselves in permanent exile, a journey that took them to Berlin, Prague, Paris, and the United States. Many of the ships’ distinguished passengers went on to make significant contributions to intellectual life in the West, even as their names were banned and forgotten in their own homeland. Khodarkovsky’s book project examines both the individual paths of these exiles in immigration and aims to provide the first comprehensive portrait of this remarkable group of exiles, recover the forgotten strain of Christian Humanist philosophy in Russia, and shed new light on Russia’s current predicament.

Michelle Lou 
Associate Professor of Composition and Computer Music
University of California, San Diego
Hybrid Listening 

While at the American Academy, Lou will develop “Hybrid Listening,” a project that approaches sonic space as a site where documentary reality and speculative construction intersect. The project considers how juxtaposition produces singular gestalts, and what tensions emerge from in-between states rather than fixed categories. Treating the world as a spacetime field, the microphone becomes a roaming, attentive ear that gathers sound in situ as situated evidence: traces of how environments vibrate, shift, and exert pressure on bodies within them. These recordings reveal animal life and architectural resonance, as well as environmental change, infrastructural systems, and the patterned rhythms of daily human activity. Sonic interventions through computer-based processing and speculative synthesis extend the field recordings into new perceptual states, treating them not as fixed documentation but as material in transformation. Such liminal conditions become both subject and method, asking what creative possibilities arise when sound occupies the threshold between categories. What emerges is a practice of “field-thinking”: an approach to listening and composing that embraces contingency, spatial multiplicity, and the generative potential of in-between spaces.

Corey Robin 
Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center
City University of New York
King Capital 

King Capital posits that the time seems right for a revisionist analysis of what capitalism is, not in this moment or the last half-century of neoliberalism, but at its core. Such an analysis would not just be an account of how the market works or profit is made, but an interpretation of the dream-world of capitalism, according to its most visionary of dreamers and caustic of critics. Robin will re-read economists as political theorists, arguing that economists’ accounts of capitalism are really visions of politics in disguise. More specifically, economic theories of capitalism are translations of ancient ideals of aristocratic, dynastic, and imperial politics. This project will focus on the work of well-known economists—Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman—and lesser-known Marxists, socialists, feminists, and economists in the Global South. 

Barnett Rubin 
Distinguished Fellow, Center on International Cooperation
New York University
A Retrospective Look at Afghan Peace Efforts from US, Afghan Government, and Taliban Perspective 

As senior advisor to the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2009-13), senior advisor to the UN Special Representative to the Secretary-General Lakhdar Brahimi (2001), and multiple other roles relating to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Rubin developed relationships with those seeking a solution from all sides. He is now collaborating with former counterparts from both the Afghan government and the Taliban, drawing on inside information from all parties to the conflict to illuminate previously unknown aspects of the failed effort to find a durable political settlement. This will show how the American view of the Afghan conflict as a counterterrorism response to 9/11 contradicted Afghan aspirations for peace and stability, which were shared to a surprising extent by both the government and the Taliban, albeit from multiple different viewpoints and visions. Recounting hitherto unreported internal struggles, Rubin and the co-authors (Masoom Stanekzai, former chief negotiator with the Taliban for the Afghan government, and Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, chief negotiator of the Taliban during much of the US-Taliban negotiations) will show how key elites on all sides pursued narrowly defined goals that consistently superseded the quest for a durable settlement that would have benefitted Afghans, their neighbors, and global powers. They will situate these struggles in the context of rapid change in the international distribution of power and the development of market forces in Asia often escaping official frameworks. They hope that their effort to produce a common narrative of the conflict may serve as a model for future efforts that will take these factors fully into account. 

Rebecca Traister 
Writer at Large
New York Magazine
Normal Was Just a Dream  

Five German teenagers were deported to Estonia in 1942. Drawing on a combination of naivete and willfulness perhaps especially available to teenage girls, these women promised to stay together and protect each other through whatever was to come. Remarkably, they managed to remain an intact social unit through eight labor and concentration camps. Liberation was not the end of the group’s story, and this book traces their path to New York City, exploring the complexities of solidarity through both geopolitical and domestic storms, the comfort and the exclusions of protective coalitions, and the acknowledgement that many classic narrative “happy endings” are not always happy and are rarely endings. Through interviews, testimonies, and archival research, Traister will piece together an astonishingly detailed story of group of women, spanning continents, and almost a century of organizing, friendship, and the struggle to survive. 

Sean Wilentz 
George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History
Princeton University
The Fall of American Slavery 

Wilentz’s Academy project will be a companion volume to his widely acclaimed earlier book, The Rise of American Democracy. A comprehensive narrative interpretive history of antislavery in the British North American colonies and the United States from 1652 (year of the first abolitionist ordinance in the New World) to 1865 (year of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment completing universal and uncompensated abolition). Although slavery is now recognized as a central theme in American history, the book departs from the prevailing view of a great American paradox, in which slavery was supposedly the foundation for the nation’s independence and emerging democratic polity. More than a history of the abolitionist movement, The Fall of American Slavery examines the broader political history of slavery’s fitful and finally revolutionary demise, in what was, by 1860, by far the largest and wealthiest slaveholding régime on earth.