Welcome to the Hemispheric Institute's new website- newly redesigned to house videos on performance and politics from through the Americas, artist profiles, valuable interactive teaching modules (with syllabi, bibliographies, documents, interviews, photographs and other hard-to-find materials), our peer-reviewed online journal e-misférica, as well as our working group forums and blogs to keep participants in touch and up-to-date on all our projects and programming.

Drawing from the post-disciplinary field of Performance Studies, the Hemispheric Institute takes embodied practice and behaviors as our object of analysis-everything from theatre, dance, sports, political rallies and ritual to the aesthetics of daily life.

For the past ten years, scholars and students from a broad range of disciplines across the arts, humanities, and social sciences have worked together through the Hemispheric Institute to advance their research in work groups, discussion forums, and publications. They team-teach a curriculum on performance and politics in the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present. Senior faculty mentor junior faculty as well as graduate students.

Our work combines electronically mediated communication with face-to-face encounter, research with teaching, electronic archives of primary source materials with field research in local communities, and knits everything together in forums for ongoing discussion and debate.

Now, ten years after it began, the Hemispheric Institute has an endowment, a strong institutional base, and thousands of creative and energetic participants. It has a vibrant future as more and more universities see the benefits of working collaboratively to transcend institutional and disciplinary boundaries in an ever more global and interdependent cultural economy.

We hope we can count on your participation!