Center for Communal Studies

What is the Center for Communal Studies?

The Center for Communal Studies is a clearinghouse for information, a research facility, and a sponsor of activities related to historic and contemporary intentional communities. The center encourages and facilitates meetings, classes, scholarships, publications, networking and public interest in communal groups past and present, here and abroad. Begun in 1976, the center is located in the Liberal Arts Center, Room 2009.

The research resources of the center are housed in the Special Collections/University Archives in the David L. Rice Library. The center archives contain primary and secondary materials on more than one hundred historic communes and several hundred collective, cooperative, and co-housing communities founded since 1965. Noted communal scholars have donated their private collections and their extensive research notes and papers to the center archives.