The Committee on Studies and Publications supports the Academy’s Council by regularly reviewing and advising on projects, considering topics for future studies, and evaluating publications, including Dædalus. Committee members from a broad range of disciplines and professions share their expertise on projects that explore critical issues, advance discussion on central questions, and offer solutions to both national and international challenges.

How do we renew confidence in America’s institutions and strengthen public engagement in civic life? The Spring 2013 issue of Dædalus suggests ways in which government, corporations, nonprofits, the judiciary, and the media can inspire greater confidence in our democratic system and a renewed commitment to civil discourse.

Academy member Denis Feeney has spent the last few years trying to understand why the Romans developed a literature in their Latin language, when the balance of historical probability was against this happening.

In Memoriam: Francis M. Bator

Transcriptions of Observations on the Aurora Borealis from the Academy Archives

Timothy J. Colton and George Breslauer gave a presentation on “Russia Beyond Putin,” the subject of the upcoming Spring 2017 issue of Dædalus.

In recent months, the media has been filled with reports of colleges and universities nationwide cutting humanities programs, at institutions ranging from large state flagships (such as West Virginia University) to smaller liberal arts colleges (such as Simmons and Lasell Universities). To clarify some of the choices involved in these decisions, the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project is releasing a series of reports on the state of the humanities in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. These reports demonstrate the depth of the challenges facing the humanities (with the numbers of humanities degrees declining in all but three states), but they also provide resources to counter some of the prevailing narratives about career outcomes for graduates in the humanities.

Building on the Academy’s commitment to the vital role that education and knowledge development play in our nation and world, the program area engages scholars and practitioners from a range of fields and disciplines to inform policies and practices that support high-quality, educational opportunities for all Americans.

"In 1956, while working in the summer as a fledgling reporter for the then family-owned Hartford Courant, I persuaded the editors to let me write what turned out to be a seven-part series exposing the extent of housing segregation in 'liberal' Hartford."

Since 2007, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences reports, four-year universities have reduced their number of departments offering art history, English, languages, history, linguistics, literature and religion. The proportion of students who major in the humanities in the United States has fallen from a high of nearly one in five in the late 1960s to one in 20 in 2015.

Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense, echoes the recommendations of Academy report on language learning, saying "we are constrained by our inadequate understanding of other nations and peoples, and by our inability to communicate effectively with them."

Few need to be told that the academic humanities have been beset by challenges over the past fifteen years, but the evidence tends to be scattered. To provide a clearer picture of the state of the field, the Academy’s Humanities Indicators project recently released the results from a new national survey of humanities departments in fourteen humanities and humanities-adjacent disciplines, the fourth such survey since 2008. Drawing on responses from more than two thousand department chairs, the report demonstrates both the challenges the field experiences today and the resilience of many departments in the face of those difficulties.

Reflections on the American Academy’s work on New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology, and War and its engagement with international organizations

Miranda Restovic and Sarah DeBacher of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities describes their organization’s efforts to bring rich, humanities-focused educational experiences to preschoolers, thereby expanding the traditional understanding of what a humanities organization does—and for whom.

On June 11, 2020, the Academy’s Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship celebrated the release of its final report: Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. Nearly 1,200 people viewed the launch event, which featured Commission Chairs Danielle Allen (Harvard University), Stephen Heintz (Rockefeller Brothers Fund), and Eric Liu (Citizen University); Academy President David Oxtoby; as well as Commission members Judy Woodruff (PBS NewsHour) and David Brooks (The New York Times).

On March 31, 1999, Jared Diamond presented a condensed version of his talk on "How to Get Rich."

On October 6, 2018, the American Academy inducted its 238th class of Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony featured readings from the letters of John and Abigail Adams by Katherine Farley and Jerry Speyer, a performance by André Watts, and presentations by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, Huda Y. Zoghbi, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Robert Gooding-Williams, and David Miliband.

Animals live in a world of limited resources. When resources that affect survival and reproduction–food, water, mates, nest sites, burrows, and so on–are scarce, conflicts of interest arise.