Video & Audio

Steven Hill is a political writer, columnist, and lecturer with two decades of experience in public policy. A co-founder of FairVote/Center for Voting and Democracy and former director of the political reform program at the New America Foundation, he is widely known for his advocacy of proportional representation, public financing of election campaigns, and the president’s election by national popular vote.

Distinguished Visitor and noted political scientist Francis Fukuyama talks about polarization in the United States, the rise of presidential candidate Donald Trump, and the effect of the refugee crisis on liberal Western democracy.

Despite an oeuvre spanning more than twenty years and a disavowal of any signature style, Mary Ellen Carroll has been investigating a single, fundamental question: what do we consider a work of art?

At Columbia Records, David Behrman produced many of the “Music of Our Time” recordings, which included works by John Cage, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and many other influential composers.

Filmmaker Yemane Demissi is producing The Quantum Leapers: Ethiopia 1916-1975, a documentary series about the Emperor Haile Selassie era.

Adam Kraft's sculptures provide the basis for art historian Corine Schleif's discussion of how art has participated in religious rituals, economic developments, art-historical debates, political decision-making, and military strategies through the centuries.

Michèle Lowrie, Professor of Classics and the College, University of Chicago, notes that Securitas first occurs in Cicero meaning "tranquility," in a strictly psychological sense. A century later the "security of the Roman Empire" had become a political slogan.

Architectural historian Spyros Papapetros’s lecture focuses on the theorization of bodily adornment by Emil Selenka, renowned evolutionist and anthropologist, and his wife, Lenore Selenka, a prominent feminist, pacifist, zoologist, and amateur anthropologist.

Classicist Michèle Lowrie’s current research concerns Roman political thought and its reception, including projects on exemplary thinking, civil war, and transformations in the public sphere. In her Academy project, Lowrie explores the Roman sources of concepts that are key to post-9/11 concerns about “national security” and “emergency.”

Spyros Papapetros’ project “World Ornament” examines bodily and architectural adornment in the work of the German architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), who understood ornament as a means of attuning humans with the cosmos.