Video & Audio

In this lecture, philosopher Philip Kitcher explores the concept of social progress by proposing that we should think of progress pragmatically -- a did John Dewey -- in terms of overcoming problems rather than as directed towards some ideal state.

In this lecture, Robert Beachy presents the broad argument from his book Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (published in November 2014 and in German translation last June). He argues that German legal reformers and medical doctors invented a new language to describe an “essentialist” sexual identity that helped to shape Berlin’s community of sexual minorities, both before and after the First World War.

For Yugoslavia, the Cold War period was a decisive moment of world-wide expansion in its political, economic, cultural relations -- and its architecture.

Historian Robin Einhorn discusses the big story about taxation in American history: the redistribution from the South to the Northeast, through the nineteenth-century tariff, and then from the Northeast to the South, through the twentieth-century income tax.

In this lecture, "A Global History of Health: Reconstructing Humankind’s Encounters with Infectious Diseases," historian Monica Green addresses the need for a narrative of global health that encompasses every continent, across time, and includes all major infectious diseases.

Historian Michael Miller uses French waterways to propose a different framework for exploring the intersection of French geography, history, and identity.

CEO of Energy Innovation, Hal Harvey, examines how decarbonization trends and new technologies indicate that we can arrive at a reasonable climate future with very modest costs and profound benefits.

Writer Mary Cappello presented a multi-modal reading drawn from her new writing on “mood”— a suite of lyric essays and experimental prose that allows for mood’s mercurial nature and gives free play to mood’s pre-conscious origins.

On September 18, 2015, Gerhard Casper, the acting president of the American Academy in Berlin, joined a panel discussion on the United States and Russia.

In this lecture, Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow Nathanial Levtow examines the phenomenon of text destruction from the beginning of writing to the formation of the Bible.