Welcome to the Center for Middletown Studies Research Website.  Here you’ll find notices about the Center’s projects and publications, including our plans for new initiatives, as well as ideas and commentary derived from the Center’s work.  Although the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed a few of our initiatives down, we’re still forging ahead.   

In April, 2021 we will be holding our NEH- and IMLS- funded Library Circulation Histories Workshop.  We’ve moved it online to accommodate the challenges of the pandemic.  You can visit the site here to get a look at the program. Check back later in this space for some discussion of what we’ve learned.   

Over the spring and summer we will be completing the final editorial tasks before publication of Vulnerable Communities: Research, Policy, and Practice in Small Cities.  The volume collects a selection of papers from the last Small Cities Conference. Cornell University Press will publish the book in early 2022.  We’ll have more to say as that date approaches.  We’re also planning another conference, focused on regionalism for May of 2022.

There’s more: the Center continues to run the Everyday Life in Middletown project, an ongoing effort to document ordinary experiences in Muncie, Indiana that builds on some of the concerns evident in the original Middletown Studies.  January, 2024 will mark the 100th anniversary of Robert and Helen Lynd’s arrival in Muncie to begin the research that would produce Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture.  We’ve begun to plan how to mark that occasion and what we can do around that milestone to continue the research traditions established by the Lynds.  And our current work documenting the experience of deindustrialization continues.  You can find out more about these and other projects, past and present, in the Research and Reports section on this site. And please check back here for details about events and other Center news.