Select Prizes and Awards to Members

As the United States approaches the 2024 presidential election, several journalists and commentators have been puzzled by one question: “Why do Americans seem so unhappy with an economy that appears to be doing so well?” Polls are influenced by many factors, but recent results show how pessimistic many Americans feel about the economy. And yet, judged by traditional economic metrics like the GDP or the Dow Jones, the economy is doing well. How do we explain this paradox?

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 that 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.

Dædalus is the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and it's published by MIT Press. The Academy made the journal open access in 2021 as part of a commitment to making ideas and information freely available. During the first year of open access, Dædalus experienced an increase in online readership, downloaded articles, and citations.

How the English department at Washington University at St. Louis reversed its enrollment slide and reinvigorated graduate training.

Learning to cope with the transitory nature of information storage and transmission will eventually become a normal feature of
twenty-first-century scholarship. In the worst cases, one wrong click of a mouse button and weeks of research, years of written text, and decades of preservation can be undermined, effectively making the written word as transitory as the spoken one.

A list of all active Members, arranged by Class and Section, Affiliation, or Year of Election, is available on the
Academy’s website at www.amacad.org/directory. IHM designates an International Honorary Member.

Since 2013, when the American Academy’s Humanities Commission issued The Heart of the Matter report, there has been considerable media discussion about declining humanities majors, an anemic academic job market, and general perceptions of a field in crisis. A new study by the Humanities Indicators, completed on the eve of the COVID-19 crisis, provides a fresh look at these questions.

The place of the military in the public consciousness has changed dramatically over time. In a Gallup poll from 2011 that measured the public’s confidence in sixteen major institutions, the military ranked higher than any other institution, with 78 percent of respondents stating their respect for and confidence in the armed forces. On December 7, 2011 – the seventieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor – the Academy convened a panel of scholars at Stanford University to discuss the military and international relations.

Highlights Include Readings by Academy Award-winning Actor Sally Field and Emmy Award-winning Filmmaker Ken Burns and a Performance by Internationally Renowned Jazz Musician Herbie Hancock

Guest edited by Denis Donoghue, essays in the volume, “On the American Narrative,” explore many of the threads that create the country’s “master story,” including American exceptionalism and the role of the Constitution as the nation’s “operating manual.” These topics, considered by fourteen prominent scholars and writers, are emerging as themes of the 2012 presidential election campaign.

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 American Academy has announced its 2014 class of new members, which includes leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector.

Over the last few years, organizations across the United States – corporations, universities, and nonprofits like the American Academy – have begun to reflect on their ties to slavery, Native genocide, and other troubling elements of American history. The Academy’s virtual event on “Reckoning with Organizational History” explored why historical self-examination matters and what can be gained from these studies.

On October 7, 2017, the American Academy inducted its 237th class of Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony included presentations by five new Members: Ursula Burns, James P. Allison, Heather K. Gerken, Jane Mayer, and Gerald Chan.

Academy Publications

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

On April 1, 2019, the American Academy and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale presented their first joint public program, which featured a conversation between David Blight and Robert Stepto. The program, which served as the Academy’s Morton L. Mandel Public Lecture, included a welcome from Ian Shapiro. Crystal Feimster moderated the program.