Video & Audio

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Adam Johnson is at the Academy in spring 2017 to work on his next novel, in which he returns to themes key to his previous works: displacement, scarcity, resource distribution, sustainability, social organization, and war.

Author Kati Marton was at the Academy on the occasion of her new book, True Believer, about Soviet Communism's ideological infiltration of the US State Department in the 1930s. She sat down with us to talk about parallels to the present and the vital importance of journalism today.

Historian Harry Liebersohn explores the globalization of culture as exemplified by music of the early twentieth-century. Berlin-based scientists, scholars, musicians, and businessmen, he argues, played no small part in making music from all over the world available to producers and consumers alike.

Historian Harry Liebersohn explores the globalization of culture as exemplified by music. He argues that technological innovations of the early twentieth century dramatically expanded music’s horizons by making global developments accessible to both producers and consumers for the first time.

Janine di Giovanni, Middle East Editor of Newsweek and contributing editor of Vanity Fair, explores what is in store for the region under the Trump administration.

Texas-based artist Trenton Doyle Hancock’s intricate candy-colored prints, drawings, collaged-felt paintings, and site-specific installations work together to tell the story of the “Mounds”—bizarre mythical creatures that are the tragic protagonists of his unfolding narrative between good and evil.

For decades, it seemed that women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa had fallen permanently behind other world regions. Today, that picture is rapidly changing. Political scientist Aili Mari Tripp explores the reasons for advancing women's rights in the Maghreb.

Jane O. Newman traces literary critic Erich Auerbach’s dialogue with these strands of thought and their European context, shedding additional light on Auerbach’s identity as an engaged intellectual in difficult times.

Hungary was the most liberal country of the former Eastern Bloc in the 1990s; today, it is the most right-wing populist regime in the European Union. What is the role of radical nationalist civil society organizations in the reconstitution of national identity in postsocialist Hungary?

Jane O. Newman is Professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. At the Academy, she is finishing her book on the German-Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), titled “Auerbach’s Worlds.”