NYIH Conversations

This is a special edition of the New York Institute for the Humanities’ Vault podcast. On October 10, 2025, NYU’s Journalism Institute hosted a day-long conference titled Podcast Intellectuals: Producing Original...

In today’s episode from the Vault, we revisit a 1982 lecture by the composer Lukas Foss, a leader of the American musical avant garde of the 1960s and 70s. In this lecture, a part of the “New American Music Series” of...

In this episode from the Institute’s vault, we revisit an October 2007 presentation by theoretical physicist and Institute Fellow Jeremy Bernstein on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb, and the nuclear arms race...

In 2010, Isabel Wilkerson spoke to the Institute about the fifteen years she spent reporting and writing her book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Knopf, 2010). The book won the...

Robert Coover spoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, including The Public Burning and Pinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic...

In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear a lecture on the revival of narrative in history by Laurence Stone. Professor Stone taught at Princeton from 1963 to 1990. He died in 1991. He is best known for...

In the episode of Conversations from the Institute, we hear from Eyal Press, who is the author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America (2006), Beautiful Souls: Saying No...

Institute fellow Ben Ratliff talks with Kelefa Sanneh about his new book, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, which tells the story of popular music during the past fifty years. Learn more about...

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, is Luke Menand’s fourth book. His last, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history. Menand is a professor of English at...

Caitlin Zaloom is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her first book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology From Chicago to London, an ethnographic study of the international financial...

Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, and teaches in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. His memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Man in...

Novelist and Institute Fellow Ben Taylor talks about Here We Are, a memoir of his friendship with Philip Roth. Taylor is the author of two previous memoirs--Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, and The Hue and Cry in...

In addition to three collections of poetry, NYIH fellow Honor Moore is the author of several celebrated works of nonfiction, including The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margaret Singer by Her Granddaughter and...

Biographer Benjamin Moser talks with Robert Boynton about the making of his 2019 biography of Susan Sontag, which was awarded to Pulitizer Prize. Moser’s previous book, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice...

This episode pays tribute to longtime fellow Deirdre Bair, who passed away on April 18, 2020. The author of six biographies and two memoirs, Bair received the National Book Award for her 1978 biography of Samuel...