IA History

Imagining America was formally launched at a 1999 White House Conference initiated by the White House Millennium Council, the University of Michigan, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The name Imagining America reflects the theme of the White House Millennium Council, focused on renewing participation in all walks of U.S. life: “Honor the Past – Imagine the Future.” Conference participants became the basis for what would become IA’s consortium of colleges and universities, and the University of Michigan agreed to be the initial host campus, with Julie Ellison as founding director.

Achievements of IA’s early years include fostering a national network of campus-community collaborators in humanities, arts, and design; developing an analytical framework to aggregate and critically consider the range of nascent artistic and scholarly endeavors; and promoting public scholarship as an important and legitimate enterprise in higher education.

In 2007, IA moved to its second host campus, Syracuse University, and hired Jan Cohen-Cruz as director. By that time, IA had taken its place among other national organizations that push the boundaries of civic engagement in higher education. In 2008, IA released its prominent report based on several years of research, Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, by Julie Ellison and Timothy K. Eatman, IA’s research director. In that report, Ellison and Eatman put forward a definition of public scholarship as “scholarly or creative activity that encompasses different forms of making knowledge about, for, and with diverse publics and communities. Through a coherent, purposeful sequence of activities, public scholarship contributes to the public good and yields artifacts of public and intellectual value.”

IA is currently comprised of more than 100 college and university members and a myriad of community partners. Annual programming includes convening a national conference and several regional meetings, and collaborative research and action projects. IA contributes resources to an expanding membership and provides significant leadership to the field of engaged scholarship in higher education.

Related Reading

The Tenth Anniversary IA Newsletter, Issue No. 13

The End Of The Beginning: Report On The First Two Years