No matter what your field of study, you’ll have access to a full complement of facilities and equipment to pursue your research and creative activity in the College of Arts and Sciences—from labs and libraries to archives and galleries.
Research Facilities
Where creativity takes center stage
The College’s Grunwald Gallery of Art, which displays work by student, faculty, and professional artists, is a visual art laboratory that fosters interaction between artists and the public. The Fine Arts Library has a collection of more than 130,000 books on art history, architecture, design, fashion, and the visual arts, and the Visual Resource Center has over 350,000 slides covering all areas and periods of art.
The Lee Norvelle Theatre and Drama Center is the hub of the dramatic arts at IU Bloomington. Its performance spaces include the Ruth N. Halls Theatre, the Wells-Metz Theatre, and the Studio Theatre. It also is home to a number of teaching and production spaces, including a 100-seat lecture hall and acting, directing, and design studios.
Where ideas take root and blossom
With 236 labs in the natural sciences, the College is well equipped to support scientific research in a wide range of disciplines. Simon Hall, one of the campus’s newest buildings, is a six-story, 141,000-square-foot building designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in the sciences. Completed in 2007, it houses more than 220 researchers from different scientific disciplines, including biology, chemistry, cognitive science, and physics. Its research facilities include:
IU’s Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center provides strains of Drosophila melanogaster—the fruit fly—to more than 2,400 research groups in 56 countries.
Other campus research facilities for the natural sciences include:
- Center for Biological Research Collections
- Flow Cytometry Core Facility
- Imaging Research Facility
- Insect Cell Culture Facility
- Institute for Scientific Computing and Applied Mathematics
- Light Microscopy Imaging Center
- Low Energy Neutron Source
- Molecular Structure Center
- Neutron Radiation Effects Facility
Where past meets present
The College’s facilities for research in the social and historical sciences include museums, archives, labs, and more. The Social Science Research Commons is the hub of social science research at IU Bloomington, designed to promote research collaborations among social scientists on campus. Located in Woodburn Hall, its facilities include meeting space, the Interdisciplinary Experimental Laboratory, and the Qualitative Data Analysis Laboratory.
With collections that include more than 30,000 objects and over 10,000 photographs representing cultures from around the globe, the Mathers Museum of World Cultures is dedicated to preserving and sharing the world’s cultural heritage. The Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology is home to archaeological, ethnohistory, image, and library and archival collections that focus on Indiana’s archaeological and cultural heritage.
The Archives of African American Music and Culture house audio and video recordings, oral histories, photographs, musical and print manuscripts, and other materials related to African American musical idioms and cultural expressions, while the Black Film Center/Archive serves as a repository of films and related materials by and about African Americans. The Archives of Traditional Music is one of the largest university-based ethnographic sound archives in the United States, with more than 100,000 recordings in its collections.