Video & Audio

Esra Akcan's September 22, 2016 lecture at the American Academy defines "openness" as a foundational modern value albeit prone to contradictions, and open architecture as the translation of the ethics of hospitality into architecture. It particularly focuses on a single street corner in Berlin, at Checkpoint Charlie.

Artist Daniel Joseph Martinez’s practice takes the form of photography, painting, site-specific installation, printed works, performance, and public interventions to question issues of personal and collective identity, vision and visuality, and the fissures formed between the appearance and the perception of difference.

Timothy Brown, a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the Academy in fall 2016, focuses on twentieth-century German and transatlantic political and cultural history, radical mass movements and the revolts of 1968, popular music and youth subcultures, and environmental politics.

Historian Alex Novikoff teaches medieval history at Fordham University. His research simultaneously embraces the scholastic culture of the High Middle Ages, Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, and the many interconnections between pedagogy and performance practice.

The language and culture of the Mandean people of Iraq, argues Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow Charles Häberl, are key to understanding both the ancient and modern Near East.

Architectural historian Esra Akcan's project brings a fresh approach to architectural history both in terms of its concept—open architecture and the right to the city—and by means of her style, including extensive interviews and visual documentation.

Mary Ann Doane is Class of 1937 Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. At the Academy, Doane was completing a book on the use of the close-up in film practice and theory, and the ways in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body’s relation to space in modernity.

Michael Watts is Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In his Academy project, Watts draws on his extensive knowledge of Nigerian micropolitics and regional dynamics to detail the relations of a range of social actors who are impacted by the effects of oil capitalism and the uneven capacities of the Nigerian state. He locates the rise of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria and contemporary insurgencies in the Niger Delta region within their historical and political context.

Stephen D. Krasner, Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations at Stanford University, notes that policies can only be effective if they conform to the incentives of political elites in poorly governed states. "Good-enough" governance -- though it may be far from the democratic ideals cherished by modern democracies -- is both a realistic and achievable goal in providing security and basic services, some economic growth, jobs, and tolerance.

Brenda E. Stevenson's lecture explores antebellum slave marriage rites/rights in contrast to some of the ways in which the first generation(s) of freedmen and women interpreted and experienced their emancipation in marital ritual, performance, and celebration during the last decades of the nineteenth century.