Video & Audio

Emily Apter considers the untranslatability of sexual safety as both concept and legislated practice.

Jennifer Allen discusses East and West German plans for surviving possible catastrophe.

Composer and pianist Wang Lu was born in the Xi’an, China, the country’s ancient capital. Brought up in a musical family with strong Chinese opera and folk music traditions, her compositions are inspired by both of these forms, and fused with urban environmental sounds. Wang’s works have been performed internationally by the Ensemble Modern, The…

Stories are much more than entertainment—they shape our world. They have inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, sparked our understandings of basic political and philosophical concepts, and given rise to religious beliefs. In this talk, Martin Puchner, author of the bestselling The Written World (published in German as “Die Macht der Schrift. Wie…

The American Ku Klux Klan is familiar to many: after the Civil War, it formed in the southern states as a masked terrorist group devoted to maintaining white supremacy and ensuring cheap sharecropper labor. But few know about the “second KKK,” which attracted three to six million members in the 1920s in the northern states.…

The rise of ethnonationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-system parties in rich OECD countries has economic roots in rising income inequality and relatively slow economic growth, and social roots in increasing geographic inequality of income and employment opportunities. What explains these politically salient problems? In this talk, Herman Mark Schwartz argues that the focus on rising income inequality…

Literary historian Martin Puchner confronts his family history through a nearly forgotten medieval language.

In recent decades, the European Union and United States have worked together to combat common strategic threats—from terrorists and proliferators of weapons of mass destruction to violent and despotic regimes in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and conflict regions in Africa. Economic sanctions—an alternative between words and war—have served as key tools of choice. Recent transatlantic sanctions-cooperation…

Jared Farmer combines the history of trees and the science of longevity to address the ethics of long-term thinking.

If colonial writing robbed Africa of its “spirit”—as the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’O suggested—what do we make of that other Western, technological intervention: the sound recorder? Around 1900, a series of German travelers undertook their own kind of “language” invasion consistent with Africa’s broader, colonial occupation. Armed with phonographs, they sought to capture what was commonly…