A wide-ranging survey of humanities departments shows that prior to the pandemic, departments in most humanities disciplines appeared relatively unchanged since the Great Recession, with the exception of declines in undergraduate degrees.

An event with Professor Akhil Amar, Professor Charles Fried, journalist Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Fix the Court Executive Director Gabe Roth, and Judge Patti Saris focused on the new report from the Academy's bipartisan U.S. Supreme Court Working Group in favor of Supreme Court Term Limits.

The Academy presented its Emerson-Thoreau Medal to Maxine Hong Kingston for her distinguished achievement in the field of literature. The award, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was first given to Robert Frost in 1958 and has since been presented to several notable authors, including T.S. Eliot, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood.

One hundred years ago, the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The publication of the Winter 2020 issue of Dædalus “Women & Equality,” guest edited by Nannerl O. Keohane and Frances McCall Rosenbluth at the centennial is a celebration of this victory for women’s rights. Yet while the inclusion of women in the electorate was a momentous occasion, it notably left behind most Black women, and while women have made incredible strides toward equality since, there is still a long way to go.

At a meeting sponsored by the American Academy, the Royal Society, and the Carnegie Institution for Science, Wendy Freedman (Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of Carnegie Observatories at the Carnegie Institution for Science) and Martin Rees (Fellow of Trinity College; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge; Astronomer Royal; and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University) discussed what we know and do not know about the universe.

Sheldon Pollock explores the fate of philology amid far-reaching social and technological developments.

The bipartisan Academy commission that issued the Our Common Purpose report recommended using the commemoration of America’s 250th anniversary to develop shared narratives about our nation’s story. An article in the New York Times highlights a new tour at Monticello -- developed in collaboration with two OCP Champion organizations -- that invites reflections on today’s challenges through a historical lens.

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.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic crisis, and a political climate dominated by fear, resentment, and division, the cochairs of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship find reason to be optimistic about America’s faith in democracy: the civic heroism of our 2020 election workers.

The Super Bowl has inspired a wager between Robert Hauser, the executive officer of the American Philosophical Society (APS), based in Philadelphia and founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Fanton, the president of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based American Academy of Arts & Sciences founded in 1780 by John Adams and others.

As part of the Academy’s 2017 Induction weekend, Kathryn D. Sullivan discussed her experiences as a NASA astronaut and participated in a conversation with David M. Rubenstein.

The Commission on the Arts is the Academy’s first major programmatic effort focused on the arts and culture. At its center is the belief that the arts are essential to both individual and civic life and that artists are crucial to the functioning and development of healthy communities.

Subra Suresh, President of Carnegie Mellon University, on the report of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences

At the National Press Club, members of the Academy's language commission met for a public discussion of their answers. Commission member Rubén Rumbaut, offered the core of the commission’s framing, “Ironically, despite the diversity of American languages, the United States has acquired the dubious designation of being a language graveyard...we have immigrants and children of immigrants not passing on their language skills.”

John Kaag describes his time as a Visiting Scholar at the Academy (2007-2008).

The new issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, explores the loss of trust in experts and institutions: what are the causes and consequences of the loss of confidence and can they be reversed?

How did humanities departments fare during the recent recession? How are departments coming to terms with fast-changing technologies, and preparing their students for the workforce? Today the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is releasing the results of a wide-ranging survey of 12 disciplines that offers answers to those questions and many others on the state of the humanities in higher education.

Members Elected in 2021, by Class & Section

On January 7, 2019, the Academy published the first open-access issue of Dædalus in the journal’s sixty-four-year history. “Access to Justice,” the Winter 2019 issue, is a multidisciplinary examination of the national crisis in legal services, from the challenges of providing quality legal assistance to more people, to the social and economic costs of an of- ten unresponsive legal system, to the opportunities for improvement offered by new technologies, professional innovations, and fresh ways of thinking about the crisis.

From the Archives