Click here to view the 2005 Photo Gallery

2005 Welcome

Thank you for visiting the 2005 Study of the U.S. Institute website, which has been designed to provide you with information directly related to our Institute as well as material of more general use to our alumni. It is also directed to other international scholars and teachers seeking information about the study and teaching of American culture. We encourage you to browse through not only the material for the current year, but for previous years as well. It is our hope to provide an ongoing forum for the sharing of ideas and the fostering of strong bonds of friendship that have developed over the intense period of each Institute's life.

Over the twelve-year life of the Institute, participants from more than fifty countries have asked variations on the same question: how does America manage to make its various competing interests cohere? That is, what are the institutions, rituals, traditions, laws and artifacts that unite the United States? These are some of the questions the Institute seeks to raise in its six-week summer program, providing at the same time the materials not for an answer, but for a discussion that might lead to the many answers that exist. Within this framework, this year's theme is "Negotiating America, Local, National and Global: A Multidisciplinary Investigation."

In order to approach this theme, we will seek to study the United States through multiple lenses formed by the intellectual disciplines that have grown up around various parts of American culture including law, politics, art, and literature. Dividing the four-week residency into three intensive segments, the faculty will focus on specific examples that reveal the larger themes and ideas behind them. The result is meant to provide not just overall insight on the part of the participants, but a practical body of useful, teachable materials that can be brought back to the participants' home countries and introduced into the curriculum with both immediate and longer-term benefits. Throughout the Institute, classroom work is divided among lectures, discussions and small-group workshops. This pedagogy is reinforced when the Institute moves on the road. Director Peter Hales provides one to three lectures and/or discussions a day during the tour, and participants have the opportunity to apply some of the ideas and concepts to a wide variety of contexts, from a guided tour of Las Vegas to a Navajo swap meet.