Video & Audio

Thomas L. Friedman delivered the Stephen M. Kellen Lecture at the American Academy in Berlin on Wednesday, April 22, 2015. He spoke about our lives being shaped more than ever by these three changes: digital, geo-economical, and ecological. How will civilizations best adapt to these changes and cushion their worst effects?

Holtzbrinck Fellow William Uricchio has sought to launch a critical discourse on the cultural importance of algorithms and their impact on present-day society.

Foreign Policy Forum lecturer and Academy alumna Esra Özyürek spoke about her new book, Being German, Becoming Muslim (Princeton, December 2014).

In this lecture, “Why Genocide? The Fate of the Armenians and Assyrians at the End of the Ottoman Empire,” historian Ronald Suny details how, in February 1915, the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire ordered the deportations and killings of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians.

Christopher D. Johnson stresses that shifts in encyclopedism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to cultivate the modern encyclopedic impulse, evidenced by the role encyclopedism has played in the history of the novel as well as the work of Francis Bacon and the Encyclopédie.

Artist Sanford Biggers incorporates icons and rites ranging from mandalas and slave quilts to hip hop and YouTube music culture, Biggers's works connect African spiritualism, Buddhist rituals, and African-American urban culture.

Daimler Fellow Bruce Ackerman identifies three sets of actors that play key roles in different forms of constitutional legitimation: revolutionary outsiders, established insiders, and a combination of established insiders and political elites previously excluded from the system.

The American Academy in Berlin heartily welcomed its thirty-fourth class of fellows at the Hans Arnhold Center on the evening of January 19, 2015.

Anthropologist and Bosch Public Policy Fellow Jason Pine looks at small-scale methamphetamine manufacture in rural Missouri to ask how meth cooking and consumption are used to enhance or “get more life.”

How differently do we now understand and approach emergencies, and what does it mean in 2014 -- philosophically, medically, politically, emotionally -- to “be prepared for” emergencies? In this lecture, cultural historian and translator Hillel Schwartz investigates the history and changing conditions of the term "emergency."