This fall the Academy Archives embarks on a new project to clean, repair, rehouse, and digitize many important documents from the Academy's early years, as well as a unique collection of records to related to the family of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

We have entered a new nuclear era. The Cold War world dominated by only two nuclear superpowers no longer exists (even if Russia and the United States still possess the lion’s share of nuclear weapons); it has grown into a multipolar nuclear environment.

May R. Berenbaum presented at the fall Stated Meeting of the Midwest Center of the American Academy. The talk was a condensed and popularized version of her paper titled "Animal-Plant Warfare: Molecular Basis for Cytochrome P450-Mediated Natural Adaptation."

The Global Security and International Affairs program area draws on the expertise of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars to foster knowledge and inform innovative and more substantial policies to address crucial issues affecting the global community. Projects underway in this area engage with pressing strategic, development, and moral questions that underpin relations among people, communities, and states worldwide. Each initiative embraces a broad conception of security as the interaction among human, national, and global security imperatives. Project recommendations move beyond the idea of security as the absence of war toward higher aspirations of collective peace, development, and justice.

Following two years of sustained deliberations grounded in reviews of innovative practices, policies, and studies and informed by meetings with state and federal policy-makers, students and faculty members, and experts from around the country, the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education released its final report.

William G. Thomas III, Anne Cong-Huyen, Angel David Nieves, and Jessica Marie Johnson engaged in a panel discussion on pedagogy in undergraduate digital humanities classrooms. The discussion, which was presented in collaboration with Emory University, was moderated by Erika Farr. Stephen G. Nichols and G. Wayne Clough provided national perspectives as respondents to the panel.

Danielle Allen, cochair of the Academy's Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, writes in the Washington Post that "There is something we can do" to move the nation toward a better normal - and peace.

Recent Prizes and Prizewinners

Academy Staff

On October 6, 2012, the American Academy inducted its 232nd class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony featured historical readings by Daniel Day-Lewis, new member Bonnie Berger, and Tom Leighton. It also included presentations by five new members: Steven H. Strogatz, Margaret J. McFall-Ngai, Maureen E. Mahoney, David Blight, and Penny Pritzker. The ceremony concluded with a memorable performance by Thomas Hampson (baritone).

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in 1780, during the American Revolution, to provide guidance to a young nation. Throughout its 241-year history, the Academy’s leadership has seldom issued organizational statements, preferring to have its projects, studies, publications, and convenings present the best available thinking about the topics in question. However, when a situation arises – like climate change – that profoundly threatens the world, a call to action from the Academy’s Board of Directors is appropriate.

For a full and up-to-date listing of upcoming events, please visit amacad.org/events.

The cochairs of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship issued a statement in advance of the midterm elections - identifying threats to free, fair, and participatory elections and ways to address them.

List of Staff at the American Academy