The Program in the Study of Imagination (PSI) was founded in 2001, and is one of several cross-school initiatives at Northwestern University. Its principal aim is to study the history and foster the practice of the imagination, across disciplines. PSI brings together experts in the university and outside scholars interested in the history and uses of the imagination. Its participants include scholars and students in fields ranging from communication studies, cognitive science, and music to art history, literature, and philosophy, and computer science.

Unfettered by traditional disciplinary boundaries, our program generates new vocabularies and methods for considering the workings of the imagination - past, present, and future.

The Program in the Study of Imagination sponsors undergraduate and graduate teaching; faculty seminars; research; performances; lectures; and conferences. All of these initiatives promote research on and showcase human imagination and aim to generate new affiliations between practitioners in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

What is Imagination?

If the mind is the vehicle of intellectual and artistic creativity, imagination is the engine that drives it. In Aristotelian inquiry, the history of artistic practices, and experiments in artificial intelligence alike, imagination (phantasia, fantasy) is fundamental to the interpretation of sensory data and the creation of mental imagery. Philosophers from antiquity to the present conceive of the imagination as the mechanism that classifies sense perception, stores it as memory, and -- ultimately -- drives innovation. The role of the imagination in art and music of the early modern and modern periods is the subject of recent innovative scholarship; new models of creativity and artificial intelligence contribute substantially to understanding the technologies of the imagination. The Program in the Study of Imagination's overarching aim is to generate new modes of understanding the mental processes we call imagination.