News and Events

Annual Conference 2026 Successfully Concludes: Advancing Global Humanities through Interdisciplinary Dialogue

 

The New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies (NYIHSS) proudly hosted its 2026 Annual Conference and General Assembly on April 19 at the Renaissance New York Harlem Hotel. Convening scholars, institutional leaders, and members of the Institute, the conference reaffirmed NYIHSS’s commitment to advancing interdisciplinary humanities scholarship, public intellectual engagement, and innovative research with global impact.

 

Held under the theme Global Impacts: Advancing Humanities Scholarship, Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Public Intellectual Engagement, and Knowledge Mobilization, the conference featured the confirmation of new institutional appointments, strategic initiatives for 2026–2027, and presentations outlining the Institute’s future directions in research, scholarly publishing, digital transformation, and international collaboration.

 

The featured academic conference, Urban Humanities, Cultural Ecologies, and the Future of Metropolitan Research, showcased original interdisciplinary research examining contemporary urban life through the lenses of cultural policy, digital education, ethnomusicology, diaspora studies, and educational equity. The program concluded with a distinguished classical guitar performance by Viktor Turudic and a formal reception celebrating scholarly exchange and new collaborations.

 

The Annual Conference marked another significant milestone in NYIHSS’s continued development as an international center for humanistic inquiry, interdisciplinary research, and public scholarship.

A New Chapter for NYIHSS: Expanding Our Global Research Vision

 

As part of its long-term institutional strategy, the New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies is entering an ambitious new phase of growth designed to strengthen its international presence, scholarly impact, and research infrastructure.

 

Over the coming months, NYIHSS will introduce a fully redesigned institutional website and visual identity that better reflect the Institute’s evolving mission as a global center for interdisciplinary humanities and social science research. Alongside this transformation, the Institute is launching several new collaborative research platforms and international projects that will foster innovative scholarship, public engagement, and cross-disciplinary cooperation.

 

Among the most significant developments is the establishment of Seminality, the Institute’s first international peer-reviewed academic journal. Conceived as a forum for original, interdisciplinary scholarship, Seminality will publish cutting-edge research spanning the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, public scholarship, and emerging interdisciplinary fields. The journal aims to become an international platform for intellectual exchange, methodological innovation, and critical engagement with contemporary global challenges.

 

These initiatives represent only the beginning of a broader institutional strategy focused on expanding international partnerships, supporting emerging scholars, advancing research excellence, and creating new opportunities for knowledge mobilization across academic and public communities.

 

NYIHSS looks forward to sharing additional announcements as these initiatives continue to develop throughout the coming academic year.

NYIHSS Welcomes Three Distinguished Members to Its Growing Academic Community

 

The New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of three outstanding scholars and professionals whose expertise further strengthens the Institute’s expanding international academic community.

 

Prof. Ivan Kovačević joins NYIHSS as one of the leading figures in contemporary European anthropology. A Professor Emeritus at the University of Belgrade, his distinguished career spans more than four decades of pioneering scholarship in anthropology, ethnology, semiotics, history of ideas, and cultural studies. His appointment significantly enriches the Institute’s research capacity in the humanities and social sciences.

 

Ms. Milla Ben-Ezra, a High Honors graduate of Swarthmore College, joins the Institute as Outreach Intern. Her interdisciplinary background in literature, sociology, anthropology, and Francophone studies, combined with editorial and creative writing experience, will strengthen NYIHSS’s public engagement initiatives and research outreach while supporting collaborative scholarly projects.

 

Mr. Ivan Filip Kovačević brings extensive expertise in economics, public policy, and international affairs. Educated at Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Belgrade, he brings experience spanning academia, international organizations, and global industry that will help expand NYIHSS’s interdisciplinary research in economics, public policy, and geopolitical studies while supporting future scholarly publishing initiatives.

 

Together, these appointments reflect NYIHSS’s continued commitment to cultivating an intellectually diverse community that bridges disciplines, generations, and international perspectives.

NYIHSS Participates in Distinguished International Academic Event: Humanities Workshop: From Words To Charts

 

The New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies was honored to participate in a distinguished international academic gathering that brought together scholars, practitioners, and institutional leaders committed to advancing interdisciplinary dialogue and public scholarship.

 

We are pleased to announce our upcoming webinar, Humanities Workshop: From Words to Charts, hosted by Dr. Marija Blaskovic.

 

Drawing on extensive experience across European and American academic contexts, Dr. Blaskovic will introduce participants to the conceptual and methodological foundations of transforming textual sources into structured data—and exploring them through charts, maps, and visual analytics.

 

Designed as an entry-level workshop, this session is ideal for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are curious about digital methods but unsure where to begin. The workshop will guide participants through key ideas, workflows, and analytical possibilities, offering a clear pathway from words to insightful visualizations.

 

Whether you work with archives, interviews, field notes, or written corpora, this workshop provides a practical and intellectually grounded introduction to data-driven exploration in the humanities.

 

Registration is required. Secure your place.

25th international symposium of the ICTMD Study Group on Musical Instruments

 

NYIHSS successfully hosted 25th international symposium of the ICTMD Study Group on Musical Instruments in New York, 9-12, 2025. We are proudly giving you a glimpse of the atmosphere, and we are happy that we hosted more than 35 participants from across the globe. NYIHSS team is grateful to all that contributed to this magnificent event, and we are looking forward to the new chapters of our inquiry.

Day 1

 

Day 2

 

Day 3

 

New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies is hosting an international conference on April 9-12, 2025.

 

25th Symposium of the ICTMD Study Group on Musical Instruments

 

We are excited to announce the upcoming Symposium of the ICTMD Study Group on Musical Instruments, scheduled to take place from 9 to 12 April 2025 at the New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies, New York, USA. As we gear up for this engaging event, we are reaching out to invite you to contribute your valuable insights by submitting abstracts for presentation. The submission deadline is 31st January 2024.  Please find further details on the symposium and themes in the attached Call for Papers.

 

Please, follow this *link* for submission details.

New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies, in collaboration with Vessels_to_motherland proudly presents its first

NYC Keyboard Fest

 

December 18th, 2021, 4pm

Hosted by Gallery MC

549 West 52nd Street, New York 10019

 

NYC Keyboard Fest is a 1-day festival containing music performances for any keyboard instrument, electronic and acoustic (synthesizers, piano, piano+electronics, toy piano), with a program ranging from contemporary piano works past 1950 to original electronic music and improvisation. It was envisioned and brought to our wide audience by Danica Borsavljevic, who serves as a Director and Founder of the festival.

 

This year’s official program presents three main aspects of the main idea:

 

1. Kids on synths + Contemporary kids (4pm)

 

Children ages 6-11 performing their own electronic and electroacoustic music and/or contemporary piano repertoire;

 

2. Contemporary piano: Past 1950 – Adam Tendler (5:30pm)

 

featuring world-renowned contemporary music performer and pianist, Adam Tendler, and;

 

3. Electroacoustic and beyond (7pm)

 

Vessels_to_motherland

 

featuring award-winning composer and pianist Danica Borisavljevic, and Juilliard-graduate violinist Nikita Morozov.

 

Objectives of the festival are to erase the boundaries between musical styles in keyboard/piano music, usually kept contained in its own venues, crowd, audiences, and performers. NYC Keyboard Fest will attempt to attract performers of varied musical and cultural backgrounds and ages, and provide an experience that reflects the complexity of time and space we all equally occupy today.

 

Together we intend to dismantle the barriers between what is usually considered a professional composer and a self-taught/non-academic composer. NYC Keyboard Fest will purposely disobey the usual requirements of formal compositional education/ higher degree in accepting submissions and look for innovation and personal musical language.

 

The official call for submissions for NYC Keyboard Fest 2022 will open in February 2022.

 

Please, follow this link for registration, tickets, and details.

2021 International Holocaust Remembrance Day

 

New York Institute for the Humanity and Social Studies in collaboration with Collegium Musicum honors a program to mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day

 

Honoring all innocent victims who were killed in Auschwitz eighty years ago, The New York Institute for the Humanity and Social Studies in collaboration with Collegium Musicum will present a program dedicated to the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In order to join millions of people worldwide, who want to protect the legacy of history, we will present a unique concert. Music for this masterpiece is composed by victims of the Theresienstadt (Terezin) Concentration Camp.

After the event, NYHSS will present David Arben’s authorized biography, a Holocaust survivor and world-class violinist who served with Philadelphia Symphony for over 30 years.

 

Join us live on January 28 at 6:30 pm, on Zoom platform.

 

https://us02web.zoom.u/j/84832889691?pwd=N1Nsck92Mk5ydmlYV25kbnU5R3BYUT09

 

Meeting ID: 848 3288 9691
Passcode: 694948

 

Or you can watch it on Collegium Musicum YouTube Live Channel

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usrd5xa5LW4&feature=youtu.be

 

and  Collegium Musicum website:

 

https://collegiummusicumnj.org/

“Sounding Roman Representation and Performing Identity in Western Turkey”, by Prof.Sonia Tamar Seeman, published by Oxford University Press, 2019.

 

This unique study represents first historical and socially-grounded overview of Romani musical styles in recent history. It is a research based on extensive fieldwork and in-depth personal experience with Romani musician families. The book also provides an accessible narrative of Turkish Romani music, includes Romani voices, terminology, aesthetic parameters, song texts, and music transcriptions. The New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies congratulate Prof. Sonia Seeman, our Chair of the Advisory and Research Board in celebrating diverse voices of the Romani musicians in Western Turkey. You may purchase your copy of this publication here.

The New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies announces new program Displacement, Identities, and Social Change.

 

Official Fellowships, Internships, and Grants Program for 2020/2021
Proposal Submissions opened from September 1, 2020, till March 1, 2021.

 

New York Institute for the Humanities and Social Studies announces a call for research, arts, and performance project proposals for 2020/2021, focusing on the main interest area of Displacement, Identities, and Social Change. Please see our Projects and Grants Section for more details.

Performance of Dr. Dennis Krasnokutsky performed at the concert The Art of Fugue, Double Violin Concerto at St. Thomas Apostle Church in Old Bridge, New Jersey.

 

Dr. Krasnokutsky joining the Collegium Musicum of New Jersey once again for the live stream series of concerts featuring baroque composers.

Dr. Dennis Krasnokutski performed Kazhgaliev’s Concerto in Astana, Kazakhstan, February 2019.

 

Dr. Krasnokutsky premiering Kazhgaliev’s Concerto for Viola and Orchestra with the Astana Opera Orchestra in Astana on February 16, 2019.

New Publication by Dr. Rastko Jakovljevic in Edited Volume Double Reeds Along the Great Silk Road, Logos Verlag, Berlin, 2019.

 

Dr. Rastko Jakovljevic published a new research paper The Otherness of Zurla: Traditional Music, Local Identifications, and Change, presented previously at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music 25th ICTM Colloquium Double Reeds of the Silk Road: The Interaction of Theory and Practice from Antiquity to Contemporary Performance in 2018.
Edited by Prof. Gisa Jähnichen and Terada Yoshitaka, valuable collection of research papers was published in the edited volume Double Reeds Along the Great Silk Road, published by Logos Verlag, Berlin in 2019.

Danica Borisavljevic performed at Piano Divas – Fusing music, fashion and technology by Paracademia, at Gallery MC, April 21, 2018.

 

Piano Divas – Fusing music, fashion and technology by Paracademia; Dress-up wireless technology to enable performers to control music parameters as they play.

Prof. Gisa Jähnichen edited new publication, Studia Instrumentorum Musicae Popularis, Volume VI for Logos Verlag, Berlin, 2019.

 

The authors of this volume come from all continents and represent a broad spectrum of professions in the field of organology. Their unifying idea is the care of musical instruments all over the world, not only those instruments that may appear interesting for commercial re-use or exploitable as symbols of traditions. They are organized in the International Council for Traditional Music, and form the Study Group on Musical Instruments.
As one of the most recent research areas within the humanities, the 22nd symposium of this study group was to initiate a dialogue on the relations between musical instruments and the perceptions and/or sensory interpretations and their paradigms such as sound, smell, touch, taste, and the vestibular sensory systems. Moreover, this topic should also help to investigate correlations between musical instruments, their physical and auditory specificities with aspects of proprioception and synesthesia, and further expand on the phenomena of musical instruments as mediators of spirituality.
The second topic of this volume covers the significance of musical traditions, instruments and repertoires as constituents of their mobilities, localities and colonization including re- and de-colonization, or place consciousness. Not only that but the second topic also follows the transfigurations of the musical instruments and repertoires as mediators of migrations, displacements and colonization and both temporal and spatial changes, tracking influences on the representation, contexts or emerging music aesthetics.
For more details see Logos Verlag information on this publication [LINK]

 

A new edition of the Asian-European Music Research Journal (AEMR) has been published, edited by Prof. Xiao Mei and co-edited with Prof. Gisa Jähnichen for year 2020.

 

Asian-European Music Research Journal is a double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes scholarship on traditional and popular musics and field work research, and on recent issues and debates in Asian and European communities. The journal places a specific emphasis on interconnectivity in time and space between Asian and European cultures, as well as within Asia and Europe.
The journal is available online under an open access license. Starting from the 5th volume the journal is hosted by Logos Verlag Berlin and issues are also available in print.
Asian-European Music Research Journal is indexed by RILM and ERIH PLUS.
You can find more information about this journal at Logos Verlag website. [LINK]

Performance of Dr. Dennis Krasnokutsky at the Voices from the Holocaust – Artists of Terezin, New Jersey, July 12, 2019.

 

Dr. Krasnokutsky after performance with the Collegium Musicum of the music by Holocaust composers of Terezin. The Collegium Musicum presents the artistic remembrance project “Voices of the Holocaust – Artists of Terezin” on Tuesday, August 13, 2019 at the Dowdell Library of South Amboy.
This music, poetry reading and discussion event will include an exhibition dedicated to the children’s opera “Brundibar” staged at the Teresienstadt (Terezin) Concentration Camp in 1944. The exhibition was originally prepared for and exposed at Berkeley University as part of their Culture against Destruction Project.

New Performance by Danica Borisavljevic of new works solo piano, NYC premieres International Computer Music Conference and New York City Electroacoustic Festival June 16-23 2019.

Announcement of Vessels to Motherland – an eclectic duo of Danica Borisavljevic and violinist Nikita Morozov, Arete, New York City, May 23, 2019.

 

Vessels to Motherland – an eclectic duo consisting of pianist Danica Borisavljevic and violinist Nikita Morozov, is a coexistence of classical/ contemporary repertoire with live experimental electronics. Prokofiev’s Sonata in F minor for violin and piano, a 73-year-old Soviet tugboat, capable of pulling even the heaviest souls, will steer into the unknown, and grind its teeth in electronic psychedelia.

Participation at the Conference Proceedings of the Study Group for Musical Instruments Lisbon, Portugal, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, April 10-13, 2019

 

Dr. Rastko Jakovljevic presented a paper The Subway Blues: Controversial Meanings of the Musical and Social Reality at the 22nd Symposium of the ICTM Study Group for Musical Instruments, held in Lisbon, Portugal, and hosted by the School of Social Sciences and Humanities NOVA University of Lisbon (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa), and its Institute for Ethnomusicology – Center of Studies in Music and Dance. With over forty participants, renowned experts in the field of organology and anthropology of music, presenters displayed new research and findings in twelve individual sessions. The official program of this Symposium primarily focused in three main areas of investigation: 1) Musical Instruments and the Senses; 2) Mobility and Colonization of Musical Instruments and Instrumental Repertoires; and 3) New Research.

Dr. Rastko Jakovljevic Gave a Public Speech, at the Public Promotion of the Dr. Slobodan Jerkov’s new Monograph Wedding Songs of Spic, Montenegrin Music Center, Podgorica, Montenegro, 2019.

 

On April 24, 2019, organized by the Montenegrin Music Center, together with the author and Ms. Vanja Vukcevic, Dr. Rastko Jakovljevic gave an analytic and introductory speech on the new publication of Dr. Slobodan Jerkov Wedding Songs of Spic, Montenegrin Music Center, Podgorica, Montenegro, 2019, held in City Museum of Podgorica, Montenegro. In this valuable contribution to the Balkan ethnomusicology, Dr. Jerkov examined traditional wedding songs of Spic region, Montenegro, collected between 1954 and 2017. Dr. Jakovljevic asserts that this publication has significant importance as a testimony of music change and influences that shaped these valuable traditional music forms, from regional to intercontinental migrations, and highlanders’ legacy practices. As Dr. Jerkov concludes, this publication aims to contain a part of the treasure for the next generations.

New Research Presented at the 25th ICTM Colloquium Double Reeds of the Silk Road: The Interaction of Theory and Practice from Antiquity to Contemporary Performance Shanghai, China, Shanghai Conservatory of Music,November 28-December 1, 2018.

 

Dr. Rastko Jakovljevic presented his new research entitled The Otherness of Zurla: Traditional Music, Local Identifications, and Change at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. With over twenty world renowned scholars in this field, the Colloquia envisioned thematic frames, including: 1. History of the double reeds and their relation to other reed instruments, social and cultural implications: from legends to reality, from assumptions to facts; 2. Technical characteristics, playing techniques, and performance practices as single instruments and in ensemble contexts; 3. Double reeds and their sound symbolism in daily life and rituals of people on the Great Silk Road; 4. Aesthetics in performance, improvisation, and composition of music incorporating double reeds from past times to modernity.

Con Vivo Music – contemporary chamber and solo piano premiere at the National Opera Center, New York City, June 15, 2018.

 

Danica Borisavljevic had another successful performance at Con Vivo Music – contemporary chamber and solo piano premiere at the National Opera Center, New York City, June 15, 2018.

Another astonishing performance by Danica Borisavljevic. Piano Solo and lecture-recital of Serbian Contemporary Music was held at New Jersey City University on September 27, 2017.

 

Lecture recital – Solo piano works of avant-garde composers from Serbia premiere of a commissioned piece for toy piano and electronics. Utilizing extended techniques, improvising, graphic notation, and live electronic in the music of women immigrants from Serbia.