Eight Women Academics Honored With the Berlin Prize

The American Academy in Berlin has announced the fall 2019 and spring 2020 recipients of the Berlin Prize. The annual awards are presented to United States scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standard of excellence in their field. The recipients will be provided with a semester-long fellowship in Berlin where they will be provided with the time and resources to step back from their daily obligations to engage in academic and artistic projects they might not otherwise pursue.

This year, 11 out of the 20 Berlin Prize winners are women; eight have current academic affiliations.

Tatyana Gershkovich is an assistant professor of Russian studies in the department of modern languages at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. During her fall 2019 fellowship, she will work on her book Tolstoy Red and White: 1920-1928, which examines the struggle over Tolstoy’s legacy between the radical Left in the Soviet Union and Russian emigre intellectuals in Berlin, as the latter sought to preserve a coherent cultural community in the face of dispersion, linguistic isolation, and poverty.

Dr. Gershkovich has a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. both in Slavic studies from Harvard University.

Renee Green is a professor in the program in art, culture, and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During her fall 2019 fellowship, she will work on a film based on her research on Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Casa Curutchet in La Plata, Argentina. The two buildings are the only structures that famed architect Le Corbuiser built in the Americas. The film addresses conditions of residency and displacement, subjective experience, institutional memory, notions of progress, architectural modernism, and the inevitability of decay, all the while rethinking how time is marked.

Professor Green is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Azade Seyhan is the Fairbank Professor in the Humanities in the department of German at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. During her fall 2019 fellowship, she will work on a project focused on a unique cultural encounter between professors exiled from Hitler’s Germany and institutions of Turkish higher education that offered them refuge and intellectual community.

Dr. Seyhan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

Laura Tyson is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School and faculty director of the Institute for Business and Social Impact in the Hass School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. During her fall 2019 fellowship, she will investigate the unique features of German business governance, labor-market policies, and systems of training and apprenticeships to help understand how U.S. businesses and policymakers can better respond to the effects of automation on employment, wages, labor-market dislocation, and income inequality.

Dr. Tyson is a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she majored in economics. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Amanda Anderson is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English and director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During her spring 2020 fellowship, she will work on her next book project, The Slow Time of Rumination, which argues that some of the most influential frameworks for understanding human thought have failed to recognize the quality, form, and significance of slow, persistent ruminative processes.

Dr. Anderson is a magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where she majored in English. She holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. both in English from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Moira Fradinger is an associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University. She researches the cultural and political debates, as well as artistic productions generated around the Argentine 2012 legal reform that de-pathologized gender identity and sexual rights. During her spring 2020 fellowship, she will detail Argentina’s contribution to new thinking about gender and sexual-identity struggles, democracy, the family, heterosexuality, and female reproduction.

Dr. Fradinger holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University.

Veronika Fuechtner is an associate professor and chair of the department of German studies at Dartmouth College. During her 2020 fellowship, she will complete a monograph on Thomas Mann’s Brazilian mother and his construction of “Germanness” and race, and how the novelist’s immigration background profoundly influenced his life and writing.

Dr. Fuechtner holds a master’s degree from Washington University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Liliane Weissberg is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Sciences in the departments of German and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. During her 2020 fellowship, she will work on a project focused on the “Golden Age” of the postcard (1890-1930), noting that postcard writing differed from letter writing by insisting on brevity and questioning the privacy of communication.

Dr. Weissberg holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. both in comparative literature from Harvard University.