Who We Are
For nearly five 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 15 Pulitzer Prize winners, 15 awardees of National Book Critics Circle prizes, 15 MacArthur Fellows, four National Book Award recipients, and numerous Guggenheim Fellows. NYIH Fellows fill the pages of the newspapers, magazines, bookshelves, and websites that people around the world turn to in order to understand the world around them.
Our Beginnings
In the summer of 1976, sociologist Richard Sennett chaired a conference titled 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 co-sponsored 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 formally established in 1977 at NYU.
From the time of the institute’s inception, the fellowship program was at the core of the NYIH, embodying its mission to support the work of individual scholars and intellectuals in an environment that encouraged interaction and reflection. About half of the early fellows were scholars in the humanities from New York–area universities, while the rest were artists, writers, journalists, and public officials.
Early members included critic Susan Sontag, publisher Roger W. Straus Jr., poet Joseph Brodsky, historian Thomas Bender, and journalist Janet Malcolm. Early guests were as distinguished: Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, Czesław Miłosz and Philip Glass, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Those initial years established the structure still in place today: Friday Forums for NYIH Fellows and guests, and events open to the public.
The Craft of Ideas
Today, the heart of the New York Institute for the Humanities program remains our Friday Forums, an opportunity for Fellows and invited guests to share and discuss work of importance to the public humanities. At a time of increasing fragmentation of our institutions and society, the NYIH brings together scholars, biographers, critics, poets, novelists, and publishing professionals in an intimate environment to engage with new ideas and emergent thought. In addition, the NYIH presents a range of public programs—conferences, discussions, readings, lectures, and podcasts—throughout the year.
A Distinguished Community
NYIH Fellows have demonstrated an outstanding level of distinction both in their respective fields of endeavor—whether as historians, sociologists, professors of literature, philosophers, classicists, novelists, critics, poets, biographers, memoirists, or journalists—and as public thinkers. NYIH Fellowships are conferred for lifetime membership. 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 Partnership with the New York Public Library
In 2020, as NYU faced a fiscal crisis triggered by the pandemic, the NYIH 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 partnership provides crucial infrastructure and a platform for a greater public engagement. As an independent not-for-profit, the NYIH is fully supported by tax-deductible contributions that cover its operating and programming costs.
