The American Academy of Arts & Sciences celebrated the launch of the new report from the Commission on Accelerating Climate Action, Forging Climate Solutions: How to Accelerate Action Across America. The report calls for a coordinated, cross-sector effort to combat climate change with strategies and recommendations rooted in justice, pragmatism, and accountability. The event featured Commission co-chairs Mustafa Santiago Ali, Christopher Field, David G. Victor, and Patricia Vincent-Collawn in conversation with Scientific American's Laura Helmuth.

What do Americans think about the arts and artists? A recent national survey by the American Academy offers a few answers.

A new publication from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences is released. Its purpose is to inform policymakers who will shape the relative safety or danger of the future international nuclear environment.

A new study by the Academy’s Humanities Indicators staff reveals significant changes in students’ majors from the time they begin their baccalaureate studies to when they complete a degree (if they do). The data focused on the cohort of students who began their studies in fall 2017 and their status as of June 2024.

The Academy is launching the Our Common Purpose Communities Project - a national coalition of municipalities committed to strengthening American democracy. Lexington, Kentucky is the first city in the nation to join this effort and identify two recommendations from the Our Common Purpose report to advance at the local level.

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.

Since the Academy was established, newly elected members have written letters of acceptance, from George Washington in 1781 to the newest members elected in 2020. In May, the Academy started asking members to share how they were experiencing the pandemic. Then came the murder of George Floyd, which galvanized protests for racial justice across the country. Subsequent reflections included thoughts about pervasive injustice and what it means to face and address racism in our country.

William Labov is regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics, a discipline dedicated to understanding and researching language in relation to social factors that include region, class, and gender. Dr. Labov has worked to promote literacy for speakers of nonstandard dialects and to develop reading and teaching materials for these populations.

On October 1, 2011, the American Academy inducted its 231st class of Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at a ceremony held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ceremony included presentations by five new members: Frances Hamilton Arnold, David Conrad Page, Sir Adam Roberts, Annette Gordon-Reed, and William I. Miller.

The humanities, arts, and culture are woven through virtually every Academy program, in which artists and humanists add interdisciplinary breadth to projects in science, democracy, and security. However, the Academy also undertakes projects that put humanities, arts, and culture at the forefront–tracking and reporting data on the health of the sector through the Humanities Indicators, and working with leaders in the field to articulate the needs of the sector and their importance to a vital and thriving nation.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has received a $750,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to advance the Academy's work on statistical indicators for the humanities.

Dysfunctional immigration policies implemented in recent decades have accelerated growth of the Latino population and racialized its members around the trope of illegality. Until 2016, the cultivation of White resentment relied on a dog-whistle politics of racially coded symbolic language, but with the election of Donald Trump, White nationalist sentiments became explicit.

The importance of public-private partnership; the assault on science and scientists; the attacks on knowledge, ideas, education, and democracy; the history of the American West and the American military; and the power of stories to teach, build bridges, and bring about social change – the class speakers at the Induction Ceremony for members elected in 2020 and 2021 addressed major issues facing the world today, with calls to action and calls for change. The ceremony featured presentations from engineer Lisa T. Su; neurosurgeon, medical reporter, and writer Sanjay Gupta; scholar and writer on civil rights and critical race theory Kimberlé W. Crenshaw; historian Patricia Limerick; and labor union activist Mary Kay Henry. An edited version of their presentations follows.

The U.S. must make competence in foreign languages an urgent economic, national security, and educational priority. Glenn Altschuler and David Wippman argue for increased language instruction, citing the Academy report on America’s Languages.

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.

A bipartisan commission issues 31 recommendations to strengthen America’s institutions and civic culture to help a nation in crisis emerge with a stronger democracy.

Building on America’s 250-year-old commitment to knowledge, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences announces the leaders in academia, the arts, industry, journalism, philanthropy, policy, research, and science elected in 2026.