• Leadership Studies focuses on the universal phenomenon of leadership in human groups. Leadership Studies asks what leadership means within a wide variety of social contexts – whether in a family, a team, a theatre company, philanthropy, a university, a multinational corporation, or a nation-state waging war. It seeks to understand the dynamics of the relationships between leaders and followers. It studies authority, power, and influence. It seeks to grasp the bases of legitimacy that leaders claim, and followers grant, in all of these relationships.
  • Founded in 1997, Leadership Studies is an active program on campus that offers several engaging courses in the field of leadership, provides students with the opportunity to concentrate in the field, hosts numerous exciting guest lecturers each year, and organizes wide-ranging conferences on issues of leadership.  Leadership Studies also supports a range of initiatives that enable students, faculty, alumni, local citizens, and the College community as a whole to study, experience, or practice leadership inside and outside the classroom. 

  • Through a wide range of courses in the social sciences and the humanities, Leadership Studies asks what leadership means within a wide variety of social contexts–whether in a family, a team, a theatre company, philanthropy, a university, a multinational corporation, or a nation-state waging war. Questions explored include:

    • How have men and women defined leadership and what are the bases of leaders’ legitimacy in different historical contexts?
    • What are the distinctive habits of mind of leaders in different historical contexts? What are the moral dilemmas that leaders in different contexts face?
    • How does one analyze the experiences of leaders in widely disparate contexts to generate systematic comparative understandings of why history judges some leaders great and others failures? How and why do these evaluations about the efficacy of leaders shift over time?