News
Communal Studies Lecture Series
Indiana was home to some of America's most radical progressive voices in the early 19th century--and some of them were women. Frances Wright, writer, speaker, and activist, came to New Harmony out of curiosity and left changed, beginning a career that won her praise and infamy in her day. Her work against slavery and for women's broader role in society set the stage for a transformation of American society we are still experiencing today. In this lecture, we will explore her life and the other women who were like her, working toward an America more in line with our stated value of liberty and justice for all.
CCS 2025 Prize Winners!
Dr. Carol Medlicott, professor emerita at Northern Kentucky University, is the CCS 2025 Research Travel Grant recipient. Lakshmi Piette Walker, a graduate student at Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Indiana, is the CCS 2025 Graduate Prize recipient.
Foundations of Community-Honoring Dr. Donald Pitzer
Communal Studies Lecture Series
Join us as Chicago-based architectural historian Professor Michelangelo Sabatino (IIT College of Architecture) and landscape architect Ron Henderson (IIT College of Architecture) discuss their new book about the famous Edith Farnsworth House in relationship to design, landscape architecture, preservation and community.
International Communal Studies Association (ICSA) Newsletter Spotlight
The USI Center for Communal Studies was recently featured in the ICSA Newsletter along with Dr. Don Pitzer.
About the Center for Communal Studies and Collections
The Center for Communal Studies promotes the study of contemporary and historic communal groups, intentional communities and utopias. Established in 1976 at USI (then Indiana State University-Evansville or ISUE), the Center encourages and facilitates meetings, classes, scholarship, networking and public interest in communal groups past and present, here and abroad.
The rich research resources of the Center are housed in the University Archives and Special Collections at Rice Library. The Center's Collections hold 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.
In many ways, intentional communities are natural laboratories for understanding and addressing some of the contemporary challenges facing humanity: conflict, sustainable living, land reform, and relations between individuals and society. The Center For Communal Studies offers unmatched resources for literary scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and others, including active communitarians, interested in the lessons that intentional communities can offer to the larger world.
