In 2002, the Academy’s Initiative on Humanities and Culture issued its first Occasional Paper, Making the Humanities Count–a study of the need for a systematic and sustained effort to collect data on the state of the humanities in the United States. The Academy took up the challenge, and on January 7, 2009, it launched a prototype set of statistics: the Humanities Indicators.

Alexei V. Filippenko discusses supernovae and the accelerating expansion of the universe.

This online data set – the first of its kind – attracted extensive attention in the news media and in the blogosphere and the website received more than 250,000 hits originating from 38 countries. The prototype includes 74 indicators and more than 200 tables and charts.

Reflections from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Receiving the Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies

While much of the discussion about the state of the humanities tends to focus on the declining number of students majoring in the humanities, the health of the field relies on a much wider array of practices. The American Academy’s Humanities Indicators project has been exploring this wider frame of humanities activity by compiling data from federal sources and conducting the first national survey about the health of the field.

The American Academy's Humanities Indicators project provides new indicators on Americans' dwindling engagement with books, the types of texts they are reading, changing attitudes about censorship, and student reading proficiency.

The Spring 2015 issue of Dædalus on “Successful Aging of Societies” explores the opportunities and challenges facing the United States as it undergoes an unprecedented demographic transformation.

Richard Saller, Elaine Treharne, Franco Moretti, Joshua Cohen, and Michael A. Keller discussed the humanities in the context of rapidly developing new technologies.

Barbara J. Meyer accepts the Francis Amory Prize and gives a brief presentation about the fundamentals of sex and death.

Some notable patterns have emerged in a series of surveys surveys asking about public engagement with various types of humanistic and artistic content.

An examination of the financial advantage earning a bachelor’s degree, in any major, provides over not attaining the degree.

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."

Select Prizes and Awards to Members

The Academy’s Francis Amory Prize recognizes major contributions to the field of reproductive biology and was first awarded in 1940. Over the years, the prize recipients have reflected the increasing complexity and remarkable scientific progress in the field of reproductive biology.

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir made history in October 2019 when she participated in the first all-female spacewalk. After 205 days in the isolation of space, she returned to a planet experiencing its own form of isolation: the global COVID-19 pandemic. As an astronaut and a marine biologist, Dr. Meir’s research into the impact of extreme environments has brought her to the depths of the Antarctic and the heights of space. At a virtual program, hosted by the Academy’s San Diego Program Committee, Dr. Meir described her research and her experiences in space and participated in a conversation with Brian Keating (University of California San Diego) about the perspectives that her work provides about our world.