Overview & History

About the Institute

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community committed to understanding contemporary cultural change and its individual and social consequences, training young scholars, and providing intellectual leadership in service to the common good. The Institute is part of the University of Virginia, which has consistently ranked as one of the nation’s premier public universities.

The Institute seeks to understand the changing frameworks of meaning and moral order in contemporary America and the world beyond, the frameworks within which individual life, institutional transformation, and political conflict in our society unfold. The Institute operates from the assumption that all humans are normatively ordered creatures that seek to flourish. From this starting point, we aim to address the most pressing challenges of our time.

Given our size as an institute, we have chosen to focus on certain fundamental questions: What does it mean to be human in this time? How, if at all, do people today find meaning and purpose? How do they pass on their beliefs and values to the next generation? What is the nature of change in the ordering of the public sphere—in its governing institutions, its technologies, and its ideologies, and what are the implications of these changes for the flourishing of human beings individually and in the ever-widening communities of which they are a part?

Not only is the Institute’s vision unique, but its character is as well. For one, while our work may have social and political implications, our first task cannot be position-taking in the ever-changing, ever-pressing contest for political power. Rather, our first task is to see as clearly and as dispassionately as possible. In this regard, the Institute both affirms the goal of objective inquiry and rejects the politicizing of scholarship. Yet in refusing to politicize our work, we also do not keep it within the walls of higher education. Indeed, we believe that because knowledge exists for the common good, it is imperative that we make our work accessible and available for individuals and institutions for whom our work would have significant impact. The Institute is also distinct for its embodiment as an intellectual community, rather than, as in much of the research university, a random aggregate of individual efforts. There are other scholars, of course, exploring cultural change, but they are mostly scattered and isolated from each other. The reigning model of intellectual individualism only reinforces this isolation. Our work occurs in the rare context of a lived and thriving community—a context historically decisive to the generation and dissemination of the most influential ideas.

For all of these reasons, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture is uniquely positioned to understand the times and their consequences, to challenge anti-humanistic paradigms of thought so influential in our day, and to build a critical mass of engaged scholars in the humanities and social sciences toward a humane alternative that would ultimately influence not only higher education but the wider world as well.

View the 2026 IASC Prospectus here.

To order a print copy of the Prospectus, please email us at programs@advancedstudiesinculture.org.