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

In the summer of 1976, 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 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 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 NYIH, 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.

Early members included critic Susan Sontag, publisher Roger W. Straus Jr., and journalist Janet Malcolm. 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.