In 2020–21, when the institute met remotely, some twenty virtual luncheons were held, including a roundtable discussion by writers Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ava Chin, Ben Lerner, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Meghan O’Rourke, talks by Alex Ross, Ian Buruma, Adam Tooze, Hermione Lee, and Louis Menand, and conversations on the state of publishing (with Mitzi Angel, Lisa Lucas, Zoë Pagnamenta, and John Freeman) and the art economy after the pandemic (Jason Farago).
In the summer of 1976, New York University 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.
Under the directorship of Sennett, and later Aryeh Neier, Edmund White, Jerome Bruner, and A. Richard Turner, Tony Judt, and Leonard Barkan, the institute's Friday Fellows Luncheon series established itself as a significant weekly event.
Such literary and intellectual figures as Michel Foucault, Italo Calvino, Czeslaw Milosz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roland Barthes presented lectures at the institute and participated in seminars.
In 2001, new director Lawrence Weschler significantly expanded the Institute's public mission, engineering a popular and imaginative series of lectures, panels, readings, and events on topics ranging from the intellectual response to 9/11 to the experience of solitary confinement.
Since 2013, when Eric Banks succeeded Weschler as director, the institute has continued to combine the intimacy of the weekly Fellows Luncheon and the commitment to broadly conceived public events of interest to a number of constituencies, including a two-day conference in 2016 on the intellectual and cultural roots of Black Lives Matter and an evening of performance and panels on the legacy of Free Jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor.