The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities (LAIH) was founded in 1998 to stimulate a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas through events both on the USC campus and off-campus for Institute Fellows and their guests. LAIH hosts bimonthly lunches for fellows accompanied by lectures from guests representing a variety of disciplines. Steve Wasserman and Steve Ross served as the initial co-directors of the Institute. Ross initiated the practice of recording the talks given at the luncheons on an inexpensive cassette recorder. Claude Zachary, University Archivist, took over recording on better equipment beginning in late 2004. Zachary has continued to record the talks, moving to a digital recorder starting circa 2010. During the COVID-19 epidemic, the lunches were held via Zoom and the LAIH preserved the MP4 video from each meeting. The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities recordings hold audio and video recordings from the Institute's lunches and is an ongoing collection. The collection also contains event fliers saved as PDF files, digital images, and speaker presentation files documenting LAIH luncheons.

3.13 Linear Feet 5 boxes

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Department of Special Collections at specol@usc.edu. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

The analog material in this collection is stored off-site. Advance notice is required for access to the analog material. The digital files described under the series titled "Digital recordings and reference material" are publicly accessible via the USC Digital Library. Each digital folder- and file-level record in this finding aid includes a link to the corresponding USC Digital Library asset.