Publications

Ian Bostridge

Lecture dates: April 11, 17, and 24, 2021

Award-winning singer Ian Bostridge examines iconic works of Western classical music to reflect on the relationship between performer and audience in his book Song & Self: A Singer's Reflections on Music and Performance (2023).

Like so many performers, renowned tenor Ian Bostridge spent much of 2020 and 2021 unable to take part in live music. The enforced silence of the pandemic led him to question an identity that was previously defined by communicating directly with audiences in opera houses and concert halls.

It also allowed him to delve deeper into many of the classical works he has encountered over the course of his career, such as Claudio Monteverdi’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Robert Schumann’s popular song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. In lucid and compelling prose, Bostridge explores the ways Monteverdi, Schumann, and Britten employed and disrupted gender roles in their music; questions colonial power and hierarchy in Ravel’s Songs of Madagascar; and surveys Britten’s reckoning with death in works from the War Requiem to his final opera, Death in Venice.

As a performer reconciling his own identity and that of the musical text he delivers on stage, Bostridge unravels the complex history of each piece of music, showing how today’s performers can embody that complexity for their audiences. As readers become privy to Bostridge’s unique lines of inquiry, they are also primed for the searching intensity of his interpretations, in which the uncanny melding of song and self brings about moments of epiphany for both the singer and his audience.

Song & Self began as Ian Bostridge’s 2021 Berlin Family Lectures.

Danielle Allen

Lecture dates: May 12, 13, 19, and 20, 2020

From leading thinker Danielle Allen, a bold and urgent articulation of a new political philosophy: power-sharing liberalism.

At a time of great social and political turmoil, when many residents of the leading democracies question the ability of their governments to deal fairly and competently with serious public issues, and when power seems more and more to rest with the wealthy few, the book, Justice by Means of Democracy (2023), reconsiders the very foundations of democracy and justice. Scholar and writer Danielle Allen argues that the surest path to a just society in which all are given the support necessary to flourish is the protection of political equality; that justice is best achieved by means of democracy; and that the social ideals and organizational design principles that flow from recognizing political equality and democracy as fundamental to human well-being provide an alternative framework not only for justice but also for political economy. Allen identifies this paradigm-changing new framework as “power-sharing liberalism.”

Liberalism more broadly is the philosophical commitment to a government grounded in rights that both protect people in their private lives and empower them to help govern public life. Power-sharing liberalism offers an innovative reconstruction of liberalism based on the principle of full inclusion and non-domination—in which no group has a monopoly on power—in politics, economy, and society. By showing how we all might fully share power and responsibility across all three domains, Allen advances a culture of civic engagement and empowerment, revealing the universal benefits of an effective government in which all participate on equal terms.—University of Chicago Press

Justice By Means of Democracy began as Danielle Allen’s 2020 Berlin Family Lectures.

Teju Cole

Lecture dates: April 8, 15, and 22, 2019

“Darkness is not empty,” writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity—and witness the humanity of others—in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience—not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we don’t.

Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Cole’s writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: “Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.”

Black Paper began as Teju Cole's 2019 Berlin Family Lectures.

Lawrence Lessig

Lecture dates: October 16, 23, and 30, 2014

Is losing faith in American institutions justified? The renowned academic, attorney, and activist Lawrence Lessig captures a sweeping, well-documented indictment of U.S. government, politicians, and citizens in his new book. What the Harvard Law School professor shows, brilliantly and persuasively, that we cannot blame the problems of contemporary American life on bad people. The problems come from compromises that have corrupted America’s economic, social, and political life. —University of Chicago Press

America, Compromised began as Lawrence Lessig’s 2014 Berlin Family Lectures.

Amitav Ghosh

Lecture dates: September 29–30 and October 6–7, 2015.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.

The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our times.—University of Chicago Press

The Great Derangement began as Amitav Ghosh’s 2015 Berlin Family Lectures.