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.

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…

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.

In this lecture, Nobel-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz offers insights and arguments from his latest book, The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (2016). Although the euro was hailed by its architects as a lever that would bring Europe together and promote prosperity, it has actually, Stiglitz argues, done the opposite:…

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?

For decades, it seemed that women’s rights in the Middle East and North Africa had fallen permanently behind other world regions. Today, that picture is rapidly changing. Political scientist Aili Mari Tripp explores the reasons for advancing women’s rights in the Maghreb.

Jane O. Newman traces literary critic Erich Auerbach’s dialogue with these strands of thought and their European context, shedding additional light on Auerbach’s identity as an engaged intellectual in difficult times.

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

At a time when Russia is alleged to have manipulated the recent US Presidential elections, Kati Marton returns to the American Academy to present her latest book, True Believer (Simon & Schuster, 2016), about intervention by Moscow in the highest reaches of the US government.

Hungary was the most liberal country of the former Eastern Bloc in the 1990s; today, it is the most right-wing populist regime in the European Union. What is the role of radical nationalist civil society organizations in the reconstitution of national identity in postsocialist Hungary?

On February 5, 2016, the Foreign Policy program at The Brookings Institution hosted the American Academy in Berlin for the 2016 Richard C. Holbrooke Forum for a two-part public event focusing on the global refugee crisis. This public event took place at the close of a four-day workshop entitled “The Global Migration Crisis: Its Challenges…

Dirk Ippen Fellow Jeffrey Goldberg speaks at the Academy about President Barack Obama’s policy in the Middle East and Europe, the focus of his most recent book project, which aims to explain the “diabolical complexities” of the Middle East.