ARENA grew out of a series of international conferences beginning with a small gathering of ten scholars at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy, in January 2002.

Summer, 2003 we formed a symposium on "Nationalism in the New World" at the 51st International Congress of Americanists that met in Santiago, Chile.

Fall, 2003, a conference on "Nationalism in the New World" met at Vanderbilt University. Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, several of the papers presented at this conference became essays in our first book:

Nationalism in the New World, University of Georgia Press, 2006; Portuguese Edition, Editora Record, 2007: ARENA’s first contribution toward “Americanizing” the conversation on nationalism is a book of essays with contributions from: T. H. Breen ∙ Philip Buckner ∙ Craig Calhoun ∙ Wilma Peres Costa ∙ Jeane DeLaney ∙ Don H. Doyle ∙ Hayley Froysland ∙ Gary Gerstle ∙Susan-Mary Grant ∙ Jack P. Greene ∙ Jorge Myers ∙ Marco Antonio Pamplona ∙ Heather Thiessen-Reily ∙ Eric Van Young ∙ Barbara Weinstein

January 2006 ARENA sponsored a panel on Nationalism in the Americas at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

July 2006, ARENA sponsored two symposia at the 52nd International Congress of Americanists held in Seville, Spain.

December 2007, "Secession as an International Phenomenon," Charleston, South Carolina. This conference will bring together leading scholars on the history and theory of secession and separatism. A book of essays drawn from this conference will be published by the University of Georgia Press. This project is supported by grants from the University of South Carolina Research and Productive Scholar Program; the Watson-Brown Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office; the Institute for Southern Studies, Department of History, and Richard Walker Institute of International and Area Studies at the University of South Carolina

Future ARENA conferences are tentatively planned for 2009 in Mexico City on "Nationalist Independence Movements in the Americas," a symposium in the 53rd International Congress of Americanists. Another conference on "Multi-Ethnic Nations" is also in the works.

In addition ARENA has been active in the annual meetings of ASEN, the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, at the London School of Economics. ARENA is formally affiliated with ASEN, the leading international organization for the study of natioanlism.

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