Over the past three years, the American Academy’s Commission on the Arts has developed a rich and diverse array of materials to elevate and promote arts education, the creative workforce, and the arts generally. Drawing on the expertise of artists, scholars, activists, and leaders of a variety of artistic institutions, the Commission developed two reports and a collection of artistic expressions.

Members Elected in 2021, by Class & Section

Reuters covers the new metric and report issued by the Academy's Commission on Reimagining Our Economy. Introduces some of the innovative work undertaken to create economic measures and recommendations centered on the American people.

On April 17, 2025, Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., was honored with the American Academy’s Award for Excellence in Public Policy and Public Affairs. The award recognizes individuals for their distinction, independence, effectiveness, and work on behalf of the common good. The award was presented to Dr. Fauci for his significant contributions to the understanding and treatment of infectious diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and COVID-19. The event included remarks by Dr. Fauci and an interview with Academy President Laurie L. Patton. An edited transcript of the program follows.

A new report, focused on improving international scientific partnerships, recommends actions the United States - the world’s largest funder of scientific research – can take to strengthen connections in an increasingly global network of science and technology.

There was a time before strong leaders, social inequality, and class systems. Coming of age in the 1960s, my motivation was to understand and hopefully help alter the world of unjust and unstable societies. This personal essay summarizes my career as an archaeologist studying the emergence of complex political systems.

Amid increasing concern over the extent to which the public values scientific evidence, a new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences offers an in-depth examination of the current state of trust in science among Americans.

The Winter 2022 issue of Dædalus on “Reimagining Justice: The Challenges of Violence & Punitive Excess,” guest-edited by Bruce Western and featuring authors from academia, advocacy, and the justice system, shows how violence, criminalization, and punitive excess have been shaped by the deep contours of racial inequality and poverty in America.

There is significant work to be done to create a nation in which more Americans obtain an excellent undergraduate education and a meaningful degree without taking on onerous debt.

As part of the Academy’s 2017 Induction weekend, Kathryn D. Sullivan discussed her experiences as a NASA astronaut and participated in a conversation with David M. Rubenstein.

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.

On April 18, 2024, Kwame Anthony Appiah received the Academy’s Don M. Randel Award for Humanistic Studies. Established in 1975 as the Award for Humanistic Studies and renamed in 2017 in honor of musicologist Don M. Randel, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to humanistic scholarship. The award ceremony included opening remarks from Academy President David W. Oxtoby, a reading of the prize citation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., acceptance remarks from Professor Appiah, and a conversation between Professor Appiah and journalist Margaret Sullivan. An edited transcript of the program follows.

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

Linguist William Labov will receive the Talcott Parsons Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for his distinguished and original contributions to the social sciences.

William H. Gates, Sr., Frank Thomson Leighton, Carolyn R. Bertozzi, and Michael Wood Speak at Induction Ceremony Sherrill Milnes Performs

At a meeting sponsored by the American Academy, the Royal Society, and the Carnegie Institution for Science, Wendy Freedman (Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of Carnegie Observatories at the Carnegie Institution for Science) and Martin Rees (Fellow of Trinity College; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge; Astronomer Royal; and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University) discussed what we know and do not know about the universe.

"Access to Justice," the Fall 2019 issue of Daedalus, is only the first of several efforts sponsored by the Academy to gather information about the national need for improved legal access, study innovations piloted around the country to fill this need, and advance a set of clear, national recommendations for closing the justice gap.

A Forbes article about "The Case for Supreme Court Term Limits" - a publication issued by the Academy's bipartisan working group - cites U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Wood and Professor Charles Fried who are members of the working group and the Academy.