Facilities
ISAW’s doctoral program is based in ISAW’s building, at 15 East 84th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, a historic townhouse fully renovated for academic use. This building provides space for the library and a study carrel for each graduate student in residence, as well as a common room, seminar room, and lecture hall. The Institute’s building is located a short walk from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts (IFA). You can read more about the ISAW building on our main facilities page.
NYU’s libraries, to all of which students in the doctoral program have access, include the principal humanities and history book collection in Bobst Library and the specialized art history and archaeology library of the Institute of Fine Arts, which contains more than 100,000 volumes and is located just six blocks from ISAW. Physical and electronic document delivery services now link Bobst, IFA, and ISAW. In addition, the rich library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is located just two blocks from ISAW. ISAW’s own library is currently under development. So far ISAW has acquired (by purchase or gift) scholarly libraries in Egyptology; Asian Art; Indo-Iranian studies; Greek and Roman art, archaeology, literature, and history; Near Eastern archaeology; and Assyriology. For a full description of the library, see the ISAW library page. The building will eventually hold about 40,000 volumes in compact shelving; volumes beyond that number will be kept off-site for rapid retrieval in a facility that NYU is in the process of developing. In addition, ISAW is investing substantially in the digitization of books to enhance the range of generally-available works concerning antiquity and in the creation of catalog records for existing digital books not currently reported in library catalogs
