The American Academy in Berlin, like most of the world, has been buffeted by the coronavirus pandemic. Nonetheless, we have assembled a program for fall 2020 that, we hope, advances our efforts to bring some of the best minds and most relevant work from the United States to our audiences. Some of these events involve a live presentation; nearly all of them will be available online.

To address the fall’s biggest news, we will devote two sessions to the American presidential election, one with Susan Glasser, who writes the New Yorker’s column “Letter from Trump’s Washington,” and one with Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA political scientist and co-author of the 2018 book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. Former US deputy secretary of state and now president of the Carnegie Endowment William J. Burns will talk about American diplomacy in a post-pandemic world; former US ambassador to the European Union Anthony Gardner will discuss the future of US–EU relations; and our fall 2020 fellows will lecture on topics ranging from Greta Garbo and feminism, James Baldwin’s travel writing, the art of the graphic memoir, desegregating private schools in the 1960s American South, and translation as storytelling.

Download the fall 2020 program.

Cover photo: Carrie Mae Weems, Pergamon Museum, 2006. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin