Join us for the 96th Annual Conference!

Welcome to the
Indiana Academy
of the Social Sciences

Keynote Speaker

Roberta Pergher, Associate Professor of History at IU Bloomington and Director of the Institute for European Studies, is an expert on the rise of fascism during the period between WWI and WWII. Her study, Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922-1943 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), asks how ordinary people made sense of, challenged, and rethought their place in society in the context of shifting state boundaries and collective identities. The focuses of her two recent co-edited volumes – In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy (with Giulia Albanese, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War (with Marcus Payk, Indiana University Press, 2019) – have clear parallels with the present day (including the question of coercion and consent in Fascist Italy) as does her forthcoming book from Cambridge UP on fascist imperialism, which focuses upon citizenship and the contract between the individual and the state.

Featured Scholarship

John Paulson is Associate Professor of Social Work at University of Southern Indiana and J. David Thomas is Professor and Program Chair of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Ivy Tech. Their collaborative project asks, “What predicts aggression and the likelihood that someone will become violent?” To explore this question, they draw on D. Randall Collins’ theory on the microsociology of violence, which proposes several pathways for understanding such dynamics." More Here...

Featured Member

Demetra Andrews is a Clinical Professor of Marketing at Kelley School of Business Indianapolis. She is an award-winning instructor and continues to publish her research on factors affecting consumer confidence. More Here...

President's Message

My name is Melissa Stacer, and I am a Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Southern Indiana. More Here...

Midwest Social Sciences Journal (MSSJ, previously known as the JIASS, is a blind peer- review Diamond Open Access Journal of the Indiana Academy of the Social Sciences. We proudly published the first issue of volume 27 in September 2024 and our second issue in April 2025. Full access to our journal is available here: https://scholar.valpo.edu/mssj/.

The Journal is accepting papers on a continuous basis and currently inviting papers for its 28th volume. All accepted papers are issued Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) soon after the acceptance of their work. Learn about the submission policies at https://scholar.valpo.edu/mssj/. You can read the most recent volume of Midwest Social Sciences Journal.

Invitation to Submit to Endnotes

Greetings from the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences! We are excited about the year 2025 and the upcoming 96th Annual Meeting of the Indiana Academy of Social Science to be held in Hanover, Indiana on the campus of Hanover College. This year, we want to hear from you, our members. Tell us what you’ve been up to, academic or otherwise. Do you want to share valuable information? Have you published an article, taken a trip, or visited a museum? We want to know. We’re interested in reporting on all the academic achievements and cool endeavors of our members, so we are inviting you to submit a brief academic blurb or a short article to our newsletter Endnotes. Contributions can be short commentaries on contemporary issues, reviews, community news, personal experiences, academic achievements/publications or any other helpful information related to the social sciences and academia. When submitting please be sure to include:

Your name
Academic affiliation
Title
Text (Between 150 – 300 words without endnotes)
Photo (if applicable)

Email submissions to executive.secretary@iass.org. This year Endnotes is moving to an online format that can be updated throughout the year instead of the annual newsletter. This new design will allow us to connect more regularly with one another, so remember to look out for new articles and features. Hope to hear from you soon!

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