The New York Public Library has appointed historian Peter Gay as founding director of the $15 million humanities center it is establishing to foster innovative thinking about society.
Gay, the Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, will take charge of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, which the library hopes to make a hub of humanities scholarship and discourse in New York City. The Cullmans contributed $10 million of the $11.5 million the library has raised for the project, among its most ambitious new ventures.Library president Paul LeClerc said he would be raising additional money for the center and that he hoped to have at least $15 million by 1999. The selection of Gay almost "guarantees a brilliant debut," he added.
A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Gay, 74, has written extensively on the Enlightenment, the Weimar Republic, Sigmund Freud and bourgeois culture. The fifth and final volume of his study "The Bourgeois Experience: Victorians to Freud" will be published by W.W. Norton in January.
The Cullman Center will provide as many as 15 scholars and writers a year with work space, special access to the library's 54-million-item collection and stipends of at least $35,000 for a year's work. It will require them to interact with the public through lectures, readings and symposiums.
Dorothy Cullman said that she, library officials and Gay agreed that the center should provide "young and other innovative writers - not just scholars - support for creative thinking about the humanities."
- Judith Miller