The Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana annually invites submissions for its Prize Competition for the best undergraduate and graduate student papers on historic or contemporary communal groups, intentional communities, and utopias. Submissions may come from any academic discipline. Author of the best undergraduate paper or thesis will receive $250. Author of the best graduate paper or thesis or dissertation chapter will receive $500.
In addition, the Center for Communal Studies invites applications for a Research Travel Grant to fund research at the Communal Studies Collection at USI's David L. Rice Library. The Communal Studies Collection's rich archival materials hold information on over 600 historic and contemporary communal societies, utopias, and intentional communities. A complete listing of communities can be found on the library website. The grant will fund research up to $2,000 to be used by 30 June of the subsequent year. For more information visit the CCS website https://www.usi.edu/liberal-arts/communal-center/prizes-and-research-travel-grant Send submissions as an email attachment to Dr. Silvia Rode, sarode@usi.edu. Applications are due by April 15, 2026.
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.
