The Craft of Ideas
For four and a half decades, the nyih has been the place where the New York intellectual of today meets the New York intellectual
of tomorrow. No other institution in the city gathers together so many distinguished writers, scholars, artists, and publishing professionals. The Fellows of the NYIH include 18 Pulitzer Prize winners, 8 National Book Award recipients, 10 awardees of National Book Critics Circle prizes, 15 MacArthur Fellows, and numerous Guggenheim Fellows. Its members fill the pages of the newspapers, magazines, bookshelves, and websites that people around the world turn to.
Our Beginnings
The New York Institute for the Humanities was founded at NYU in 1977. Early members included sociologist Richard Sennett, critic Susan Sontag, journalist Janet Malcolm, and publisher Roger Straus. Early guests were as distinguished: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Czeslaw Milosz and Philip Glass, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Those initial years established the structure still in place today: weekly forums for Fellows and guests, and events open to the public.
A Forum of Ideas
Today, the heart of the New York Institute for the Humanities program remains our weekly invitational Fellows Forums. At a time of increasing fragmentation of our institutions and our society, the NYIH offers an intimate environment for scholars, biographers, critics, poets, novelists, and publishing professionals to engage with critical new ideas and emergent thought, and, crucially, with one another. In addition, the NYIH presents public conferences, discussions, readings, lectures, and podcasts throughout the year.
A Distinguished Community
NYIH Fellows become members for life. Each Fellow demonstrates excellence in scholarship, literary endeavor, and a high level of distinction in his or her field—whether as historians, sociologists, professors of literature, philosophers, classicists, novelists, critics, poets, biographers, memoirists, or journalists. The relationships fostered by the nyih have decisive effects on the intellectual and practical horizons of its Fellows, opening new doors to their ideas and their work.
A New Partnership
In 2020, facing a financial crisis triggered by the pandemic, NYU ended its sponsorship of the NYIH. Under the guidance of a new board of directors, the NYIH has reorganized as a 501(c)(3) and forged a new connection with the New York Public Library, among the worldʼs greatest research and education institutions. This new partnership provides crucial infrastructure and a platform for a greater public engagement, but we must now raise funds to cover modest but crucial operating costs.
