Video & Audio

Jennifer Allen discusses preparations for the end of world in Cold War Germany.

Writer Anne Finger visits the site of a former Nazi psychiatric facility, only to find it forgotten.

Jared Farmer approaches the global history of conservation through monumental trees.

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.