Conversations with Frank Gehry author Barbara Isenberg's home at USC is the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, an unusual center that merges intellectual life with the civic life of the city.

The institute is housed in Doheny Memorial Library, although events are held both on campus and off. The regular events are biweekly lunches, but there are also occasional walk-throughs of new art exhibitions at the Geffen Contemporary, LACMA and other museums.

The institute includes about 100 fellows – half from academia and half from the non-academic world. These writers, musicians, dancers, curators, critics, poets, artists and scholars represent a plethora of local and national institutions: museums, film societies, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, theatre companies and libraries, among others.

The lunches prompt cross-disciplinary exchanges of ideas, as attendees chew on the words of invited speakers – some fellows and some not. Recent speakers have held forth on “Creativity and Copyright: The Surprising Tale of the Fashion Industry,” “Between Digital Hell and Digital Hope” and “The Crooked Mirror: A Conversation with Poland.”

Says Isenberg: “Fellows are interested not only in what they do and think, but also in what the larger world is thinking and doing. Discussion after each lunch talk is an integral part of the event, integrating ideas as people from various disciplines add new and stimulating insights. In fact, many current faculty members – including novelist Marianne Wiggins, historian William Deverell, science writer K. C. Cole and new-media journalist Marc Cooper – first really got to know the university through their membership in the institute.”

Steven J. Ross, professor and chair of the Department of History at USC College, founded the institute in 1998 with Steve Wasserman, then the book review editor of the Los Angeles Times. Ross is co-director with Louise Steinman, cultural programs director for the Los Angeles Public Library. Ross notes that Steinman has called on many institute fellows to speak or moderate events for the ALOUD discussion series at the library.

For the past several years, the institute has run a series of programs titled “Dialogues” for undergraduates as part of USC's Visions and Voices initiative. “Our most recent event, 'Seeing Los Angeles: Exploring the Invisible City,' explored how, in the vast geography of Southern California, whole communities disappear between freeway exits,” Ross says.

– Allison Engel