New York Institute for the Humanities

Last updated

The New York Institute for the Humanities (NYIH) is an academic organization founded by Richard Sennett in 1976 to promote the exchange of ideas between academics, writers, and the general public. [1] [2] The NYIH regularly holds seminars open to the public, as well as meetings for its approximately 250 Fellows. Previously affiliated with the New York University, in 2021, the institute announced its partnership with the New York Public Library.

Contents

About

At its founding, the New York Institute for the Humanities was at the forefront of exploring how scholars and writers could come together around issues of common and broad interest. Since that time, the institute has expanded on the original inspiration of its celebrated founders, which included Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, to dedicate itself to examining the status and role of the humanities in the public sphere. The institute comprises nearly 250 distinguished scholars and writers—journalists of ideas, critics, novelists, biographers, memoirists, poets, and translators—in addition to noted editors, publishers, and literary agents. Elected to membership in the NYIH by their peers, fellows hold a lifetime appointment.

During the academic term, NYIH fellows gather for a semiweekly luncheon-seminar organized around a presentation or panel discussion, frequently featuring the work of a member of the institute. Drawing on the interests and intellectual creativity of its fellows, these Friday Fellows Luncheons have become justly celebrated for their contribution to New York's intellectual culture. In 2020–21, when the institute met remotely, some twenty virtual luncheons were held, including a roundtable discussion by writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ava Chin, Ben Lerner, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Meghan O’Rourke, talks by Alex Ross, Ian Buruma, Adam Tooze, Hermione Lee, and Louis Menand, and conversations on the state of publishing (with Mitzi Angel, Lisa Lucas, Zoë Pagnamenta, and John Freeman) and the art economy after the pandemic (Jason Farago).

History

In the summer of 1976, New York University sociologist Richard Sennett chaired a conference on the Humanities and Social Thought in Bellagio, Italy, in which the idea for a New York–based institute to foster intellectual discourse and cross-disciplinary communication was explored. In December of that year, NYU and Sennett's Center for Humanistic Studies cosponsored the conference “The Future of the Intellectual Community in New York.” The ideas that arose from the conference provided the structure for the New York Institute for the Humanities, which was established in 1977 at NYU by an act of the university's board of trustees.

From the time of the institute's inception, the fellowship program was at the core of the New York Institute for the Humanities, embodying its mission to support the work of individual scholars and intellectuals in an environment that encouraged interaction. About half of the early fellows were academics from New York-area universities, while the rest were artists, writers, journalists, and public officials. In the early years, fellows generally met once or twice a month for informal seminars. As the institute grew, a more defined program evolved in which fellows formed interdisciplinary seminars around topics of interest and participated in weekly lunches. Under the directorship of Sennett, and later Aryeh Neier, Edmund White, Jerome Bruner, and A. Richard Turner, Tony Judt, and Leonard Barkan, the institute's Friday Fellows Luncheon series established itself as a significant weekly event.

From its beginnings, the institute has also hosted public lecture series and conferences. In the early years of its existence, the James Lecture Series brought primarily European intellectuals to the institute. The Gallatin Lecture Series was created shortly thereafter to provide a diverse public audience for American humanists. Such literary and intellectual figures as Michel Foucault, Italo Calvino, Czeslaw Milosz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roland Barthes presented lectures at the institute and participated in seminars. In 1981 the Institute launched a Humanities Exchange Program for writers exiled from Latin American and Eastern European regimes.

In 2001, new director Lawrence Weschler significantly expanded the Institute's public mission, engineering a popular and imaginative series of lectures, panels, readings, and events on topics ranging from the intellectual response to 9/11 to the experience of solitary confinement. The public offerings were topically diverse: panels considered the legacy of film criticism and the Iraq War, the visionary theories of David Hockney and the rise of comics and graphic novels. Under Weschler's directorship, the fellowship also underwent considerable expansion, growing to include approximately 250 fellows from a variety of fields.

Since 2013, when Eric Banks succeeded Weschler as director, the institute has continued to combine the intimacy of the weekly Fellows Luncheon and the commitment to broadly conceived public events of interest to a number of constituencies, including a two-day conference in 2016 on the intellectual and cultural roots of Black Lives Matter and an evening of performance and panels on the legacy of Free Jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor. A partnership with Princeton University Press established a semi-annual lecture series that revisited the ambitions of the original Gallatin and James lectures. In 2018, the institute launched an additional outreach with the development of a podcast series, in collaboration with the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU, comprising original conversations among fellows and archival presentations culled from the past four decades of NYIH lectures and discussions.

In 2021, the institute announced its partnership with [3] the NYPL, which will provide the NYIH with an expanded set of opportunities for public programming and a new home for the institute's weekly Fellows Luncheon-Seminars.

Directors

1977–78: – Richard Sennett

1978–79: – Richard Sennett and Thomas Bender

1979–80: – Loren Baritz

1980–81: – Aryeh Neier

1981–83: – Edmund White

1983–84: – Edmund White and Richard Sennett

1984–85: – Jerome Bruner

1986–87: – William R. Taylor and A. Richard Turner

1987–92: – A. Richard Turner

1993–96: – Tony Judt

1996–97: – A. Richard Turner and Anne Hollander

1997–2001: – Leonard Barkan

2001–2013: – Lawrence Weschler

2013–present: – Eric Banks

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerome Bruner</span> American psychologist and scholar

Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British Academy</span> National academy of humanities and social sciences

The British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spanning all disciplines across the humanities and social sciences and a funding body for research projects across the United Kingdom. The academy is a self-governing and independent registered charity, based at 10–11 Carlton House Terrace in London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indian Institute of Advanced Study</span> Research institute in Shimla, India

The Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) is a research institute located in Shimla, India. It was set up by the Ministry of Education, Government of India in 1964 and started functioning from 20 October 1965. It is currently housed in the Rashtrapati Niwas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York University School of Law</span> Law school of New York University in Manhattan, New York City

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence Schiffman</span> American historian

Lawrence Harvey Schiffman is a professor at New York University ; he was formerly Vice-Provost of Undergraduate Education at Yeshiva University and Professor of Jewish Studies. He had previously been Chair of New York University's Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and served as the Ethel and Irvin A. Edelman Professor in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University (NYU). He is currently the Judge Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and Director of the Global Institute for Advanced Research in Jewish Studies. He is a specialist in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Judaism in Late Antiquity, the history of Jewish law, and Talmudic literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York University Institute of Fine Arts</span>

The Institute of Fine Arts (IFA) is a graduate school and research center of New York University dedicated to the study of the history of art, archaeology, and the conservation and technology of works of art. It offers Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Art History and Archeology, the Advanced Certificate in Conservation of Works of Art, and the Certificate in Curatorial Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lawrence Weschler</span>

Lawrence Weschler is an author of works of creative nonfiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Sennett</span> American sociologist

Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Goldstein</span> American philosopher and writer (born 1950)

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craig Calhoun</span> American sociologist (born 1952)

Craig Jackson Calhoun is an American sociologist, currently University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. An advocate of using social science to address issues of public concern, he was the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from September 2012 until September 2016, after which he became the first president of the Berggruen Institute. Prior to leading LSE, Calhoun led the Social Science Research Council, and was University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University and Director of NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge. With Richard Sennett he co-founded NYLON, an interdisciplinary working seminar for graduate students in New York and London who bring ethnographic and historical research to bear on politics, culture, and society.

Joy Garnett is an artist and writer from New York, United States. Trained as a painter, her work explores contemporary practices around cultural preservation, alternative histories and archives. Her interdisciplinary work combines creative writing, research and visual media. In her early paintings (1997-2009), Garnett engaged issues around contemporary consumption of media and the distinctions between documentary, technical, and artistic image making. Her mature work draws on archival images, alternative histories and the legacy of her maternal grandfather, the Egyptian Romantic poet, bee scientist and polymath Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi. Garnett is married to conceptual photographer and video artist Bill Jones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NY Salon</span>

NY Salon is an organization based in New York City composed of intellectuals, academics, artists, and public personalities. They collaborate with foundations, universities, and notable individuals to host discussions of today's issues, design lectures and debates, and hold forums to review controversies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Classicist</span>

The Digital Classicist is a community of those interested in the application of digital humanities to the field of classics and to ancient world studies more generally. The project claims the twin aims of bringing together scholars and students with an interest in computing and the ancient world, and disseminating advice and experience to the classics discipline at large. The Digital Classicist was founded in 2005 as a collaborative project based at King's College London and the University of Kentucky, with editors and advisors from the classics discipline at large.

The Centre for the History of the Book (CHB) was established in 1995 at The University of Edinburgh as an international and interdisciplinary centre for advanced research into all aspects of the material culture of the text - its production, circulation, and reception from manuscript to the electronic text.

Aryeh Neier is an American human rights activist who co-founded Human Rights Watch, served as the president of George Soros's Open Society Institute philanthropy network from 1993 to 2012, had been National Director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1970 to 1978, and he was also involved with the creation of the group SDS by being directly involved in the group SLID's renaming.

Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the dean of research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the university itself.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Elizabeth Fleming</span> American historian

Katherine Elizabeth Fleming is President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization in the Department of History at New York University (NYU) as well as Provost Emerita of the university. She was Provost of NYU from 2016 to 2022. She has been President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust since August 1, 2022, an appointment with which she became "effectively...the most powerful woman in the US museum world." Since arriving at the Getty, she has shown an interest in new models for the ownership of art and has moved to further Getty's commitments to the Southern California art community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tony Judt</span> British-American historian (1948–2010)

Tony Robert Judt was a British-American historian, essayist and university professor who specialized in European history. Judt moved to New York and served as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University and director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute. He was a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. In 1996 Judt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York University Department of Philosophy</span> Division of New York University

The New York University Department of Philosophy is ranked 1st in the US and 1st in the English-speaking world as of the most recent edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report from 2021. It is also ranked 1st in the world by the 2023 QS World University Rankings, and is internationally renowned. It has particular strengths in epistemology, history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of mind. The department offers B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy, as well as a minor in philosophy and a joint major in language and mind with the NYU Departments of Linguistics and Psychology. It is home to the New York Institute of Philosophy, a research center that supports multi-year projects, public lectures, conferences, and workshops in the field, as well as outreach programs to teach New York City high school students interested in philosophy.

The Remarque Institute is an institute at New York University which focuses its research on contemporary Europe. It was founded in 1995 by Professor Tony R. Judt and is named after the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, whose widow made a major donation to NYU. Its aims are "to support and promote the study and debate on Europe, and to encourage and facilitate communication between Americans and Europeans".

References

  1. ↑ "N.Y.U. Names Director Of Humanities Institute", New York Times, April 3, 1987, retrieved 2008-04-02
  2. ↑ Richardson, Lynda (January 13, 2001), "Headhunting For a Thinker And a Buzz", New York Times, retrieved 2008-04-02
  3. ↑ Schuessler, Jennifer (2021-04-15). "A New York Intellectual Bastion Finds a New Home". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-01-10.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.