Roosevelt Stichting

The Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) is a research institute, conference center, and library on twentieth-century American history located in the twelfth-century Abbey of Middelburg, the Netherlands. Until 2017, it was known as the Roosevelt Study Center. The Institute is named after three famous Americans, whose ancestors emigrated from Zeeland, the Netherlands, to the United States in the seventeenth century: President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), and Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962).

The roots of the Institute date back to 1982, when Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted American historian, and William J. vanden Heuvel, president of the Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York, launched the initiative to establish a European research facility specialized in twentieth-century American history in Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland. Their initiative, discussed with the Provincial Government of Zeeland in the years 1982-1984, resulted in the opening of the Roosevelt Study Center in 1986.

In 2016, 30 years after its founding, the Center entered into a partnership with the University of Leiden. Consequently, the Center was renamed to the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, and acquired a new set of activities, including the establishment of a graduate school for US history. The RIAS is subsidized by the Provincial Government of Zeeland and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Private corporations and institutions sponsor particular programs of the RIAS.

The RIAS cooperates with Dutch universities in research projects, as well as with the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in various ways. The center, for instance, annually awards the best Master Thesis on American History with the Theodore Roosevelt American History Award (TRAHA), which grants the winner a trip to the key sites of interest of the Roosevelts.

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