Academy’s Commission on the Arts issues Art is Work: Policies to Support Creative Workers, recognizing the importance of artists to the national economy

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has named Kwame Anthony Appiah - author, philosopher, and public intellectual - the recipient of the Academy's award for outstanding contributions to humanistic scholarship.

Maxine Hong Kingston is awarded the Academy’s Emerson-Thoreau medal, which was first given to Robert Frost in 1958 and has since been presented to other notable authors such as T.S. Eliot, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood.

The American Academy has a long-standing interest in arms control and international security studies, dating back to the late 1950s with the formation of the US Committee on the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs and the establishment in 1982 of the Academy's Committee on International Security Studies.

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

On January 25, 2013,Thomas Levy described “cyber-archaeology” and the important role it plays in helping to promote excellence in the humanities and social sciences.

Over the past eighteen months, the Academy has partnered with the Northeast Document Conservation Center to repair, clean, and digitize six bound volumes of letters and other documents related to early Academy member and donor Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) and his daughter, Sarah.

The 2015 class includes Pulitzer Prize-winner Holland Cotter, singer-songwriter Judy Collins, Nike co-founder Philip Knight, Nobel Prize-winner Brian Kobilka, Tony Award-winner Audra McDonald, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and novelist Tom Wolfe.

Reuters covers the new metric and report issued by the Academy's Commission on Reimagining Our Economy. Introduces some of the innovative work undertaken to create economic measures and recommendations centered on the American people.

Patricia Meyer Spacks reflects on the life and work of Mary Maples Dunn, co-director of the Visiting Scholars Program at the American Academy.

Essays explore Russia under Vladimir Putin and the prospects for significant political changes today and in a post-Putin era.

A recent report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences calls for more attention to language teaching in the U.S. The report notes that U.S. students have much less access to foreign language instruction than students in other economically developed countries, and that Americans are thus much less likely to be bi- or multilingual.

Affordability and credential attainment are important goals. But the big question for higher education now, some of the enterprise's best minds say, is "completion of what?" Inside Higher Ed explores the Daedalus volume on Improving Teaching.

The Academy holds virtual events as well as in-person events around the country and the world that bring members, representatives of the Affiliates, and others together to explore topics of national and global concern.

The Academy issued its first volume of papers in 1786.

Martha Nussbaum accepts the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies and speaks about a philosophical approach to anger and fear.