The Vault

The writer and pianist Charles Rosen combined musicianship and critical acuity to a degree of accomplishment matched by few figures in the twentieth century. In this episode, we revisit Rosen’s 1978 lecture at the institute, on stage and at the keyboard, titled “Memory in Romantic Song Cycles.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2004, journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski gave a luncheon lecture about the Greek historian Herodotus. He described Herodotus as the “first reporter,” a globalist who traveled to the edges of the known world to learn about how people other than the Greeks lived. In Herodotus’s Histories Kapuscinski finds the origins of modern reportage itself. An expanded version of the lecture was published in 2007...

In October of 1977, Susan Sontag delivered one of the institute’s five James Lectures for that year. Her topic was “Illness as Metaphor”. She explored the truth that it was no longer possible, as she wrote, “to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.” Though she did not directly reference it, she herself was being tre...

At a luncheon of institute fellows in May of 2010, Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton sat down for a conversation about Hitchens’s forthcoming memoir, Hitch 22. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The work of V. S. Naipaul, who died in August 2018 at age 85, provided an excoriating examination of what it means to be a colonial and postcolonial subject. In 1979, the novelist paid a visit to NYU in order to deliver the James Lectures at the New York Institute for the Humanities. In the second of two archival episodes, Naipaul reads an excerpt from his 1971 novel In a Free State and a passage...

The work of V.S. Naipaul, who died in August 2018 at age 85, explored the depths of the postcolonial experience, beginning with his youth in his native Trinidad. In 1979, the novelist visited NYU to deliver the New York Institute for the Humanities’ James Lectures. In the first of two archival episodes, Naipaul lectures on his experience as a young reader and in the “incomplete space” of the Carib...

Welcome to the New York Institute for the Humanities podcast. Learn more about the history of the Institute and our shows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a new member of Congress in 1973, Elizabeth Holtzman participated in deliberations over the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon. In this lecture given in 2006, she reflects on the legacy of impeachment from Nixon to Bill Clinton and argues for its use against George W. Bush. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices