What is the NYI Institute?

The NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies is an advanced LIVE study program focusing on underrepresnted and interdisciplinary fields of study, concerned with human language, culture, and society with seminars, lectures and workshops in critical cultural studies, theoretical linguistics and a range of other fields

V-NYI #9 will be held June 27-July 12, 2024. 
This will be the 25th consecutive session of NYI and the 9th Virtual LIVE session, available worldwide.

Since 2003, over 1900 participants from 70+ countries have received certificates for completing the NYI Seminar Programs

Participants create a program design unique to their own interests, choosing 3-4 seminars from among the following fields
• Critical Cultural Studies
• Decolonial Studies
• Race and Ethnicity Studies
• Gender and Sexuality Studies

• Theoretical Linguistics (Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, Phonology)

Seminars and Workshops posted under PROGRAM

V-NYI #9 General Information

• 27 Seminars (14 Ling, 11 Cult), 10 General Lectures, 3 Interactive Workshops
• students select 3-4 Seminars and/or Workshops

• all classes synchronous and LIVE only
• seminars meet 6 times over 2 weeks (M/W/F or T/Th/S)
• V-NYI #9 Certificate upon completion

Daily Schedule:
• 9:00-10:20 am (NY) (4:00-5:20 pm, Kyiv/St. P):  Seminars & Workshops
• 10:30-11:50 am 
(NY) (5:30-6:50 pm, Kyiv;/St. P): Seminars & Workshops
• 12:00-1:20 pm (NY) (7:00-8:20 pm Kyiv/St. P): "Global Solidarity" Lecture Series / Workshops & Seminars
• 1:30-2:50 pm 
(NY) (8:30-9:50 pm, Kyiv/St. P): "Distinguished Linguist" Lecture Series

• 3:00 pm (NY): Occasional Special Events

Lecture series posted under NEWS

NYI Philosophy

NYI believes that traditional academic boundaries inadvertently prevent young intellectuals from engaging with many important areas of modern inquiry which do not fall neatly into disciplinary frames, including the cognitive sciences, which study the workings of the human mind, and critical cultural studies, which concentrate on comparative aspects of human societies. NYI is proud to have gathered an international group of faculty who are not only specialists in their fields, but also have experience working in intercultural environments.

NYI was held in St. Petersburg every summer from 2003-2019. In 2020, NYI move to the Virtual Sky, as V-NYI.  247 students in 43 countries participated live, via Zoom. In January, 2021, V-NYI held its first ever Winter Session, Jan. 18-29, 2021 with 243 students in 46 countries. V-NYI #3 was held July 16-30, 2021. The third virtual institute welcomed 236 students in 41 countries. V-NYI #4 was held Jan 10-21, 2022 and reached 196 students in 36 countries. V-NYI #5, free for all partiicants in solidarity with victims of war, was held June 30-July 15, 2022 with 343 students in 54 countries.  V-NYI #6 was held Jan. 15-29, 2023 with 230 students in 48 countries. V-NYI #7 was held June 29-July 14, 2023 with 180 students in 45 countries.  V-NYI #8 was held Jan. 12-23, 2024 with 286 students in 49 countries.
V-NYI #9 will be held June 27-July 12, 2024. 

In Fall, 2022,  NYI expanded to become the NYI Universe, an on-going series of seminars, lectures, working geoups, publications, and discourse in the controversial areas of our time. Our continuing working groups are Writing against Borders, Café Elsewhere and Talking about Trees

NYI statement on the invasion of Ukraine

The entire NYI Team stands strongly against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which we consider an outrageous violation of international law, unjustified by any considerations of historical context.  We believe that the brutal attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, the wanton destruction of cities and towns, the overt attempt at general annihilation, the use of banned weapons, the attack on nuclear facilities and on humanitarian corridors, are immoral and inhumane, and constitute war crimes of unprecedented proportions. We stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.

We also strongly condemn the repression and censorship that we are witnessing within Russia and we voice our unequivocal support for all those who protest this senseless act of violence, including many current and former NYI students, staff and faculty.

We are also united against those who willingly close their eyes to the realities of the lived experience of people suffering and dying in Ukraine, as well as to those experiencing repression within Russia.

Until Covid forced us to go virtual in 2020, the NYI school had been organized as a joint project between Stony Brook University and universities in St. Petersburg, and ran for 17 consecutive summers, from 2003-2019. It was a non-profit program, open to undergraduates and graduate students from any country and any institutions. People from the US and Iran, Ukraine and Russia, Serbia and Croatia, and dozens of other countries, all participated in open discussion of pressing cultural, cognitive, and linguistic issues in the then safe and always beautiful spaces of St. Petersburg. Over a hundred students each year (over a thousand in all), along with dozens of faculty, came from distances as far as Los Angeles and Pretoria and Khabarovsk over those 17 years to make the trip to St Petersburg for a magic summer of borderless cultural interaction and intellectual exploration.

Then, in the height of the first waves of the global covid pandemic, the school went virtual as V-NYI, and grew to include 200-250 students from 50+ countries attending each session live via zoom, starting in summer 2020, continuing in winter and summer 2021, winter and summer 2022, and most recently in winter 2023, with V-NYI #6.  The six V-NYI Institutes have hosted over 1400 students from over 70 countries.  In March, 2022, we became the NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive and Linguistic Studies.

As of Fall, 2022, NYI is now active year-round. All former NYI students, TAs and faculty are invited to participate in ongoing live NYI programming. 

Нет войне. 

With peace and solidarity,
The V-NYI Team

Constellations

Constellations is a peer-reviewed, online journal devoted both to literary and linguistic scholarship, and to creative writing across all genres.

Originally affiliated with the NYI Global Institute of Cultural, Cognitive, and Linguistic Studies), Constellations is now venturing beyond the bounds of NYI into the larger pluriverse.

Constellations is a capacious and welcoming home for scholars and writers, for many of whom English is an adoptive language. Few of the contributors are what were once called “native speakers,” and most have not resided in an anglophone country for any length of time—except insofar as the Internet may be considered a digital anglophone country. Rather than an obstacle to be overcome, we believe this is a source of our brilliance as a “constellation”; it is a source of light.

In our editorial practices and choices, we have made a conscious decision to avoid thoughtlessly correcting what might be deemed “errors” in standardized or textbook English. The “Englishes” of our contributors often work powerfully on the level of metaphor and association. Non-native speakers often dare to take risks with language that native speakers might, unfortunately, shy away from. For this reason, our editorial practice is one of “scrupulous reading”—by which we mean meeting the texts halfway, not emending them unnecessarily from on high.

We respond favorably to texts that are rooted in the urgencies of a living social context and praxis, texts that grope their way toward a futurity, in the absence of any guarantees that a future will materialize at all. At the same time, we do not shun nostalgia out-of-hand. Many of our contributors are “elsewheres,” as we have called ourselves—people who have been displaced, sometimes multiple times, under duress (war, political repressions, forced exile) from places/spaces they originally inhabited. Dwelling deeply on the past is sometimes the only means of finding passage beyond, through, or forth, into an unknown “now” (not to mention future).

Our errors are fecund; they lead us to new, truer paths of expression and action. Thus, we embrace the “errors of our ways.”

Our pronouns are myriad.

We also allow ourselves to fall into reflective, hibernatory sleep; to dream, and to be claimed by our dreamworlds. (After all, sleep and dreams are inevitable.) We acknowledge that the future must be envisioned—dreamed—before it can be lived, or averted.

Thus, our editorial practices are “scrupulous, with a difference.” And the difference is, perhaps, all.