Aug 2-8, 2026

Wilmington, DE

Overview

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Join other exceptional students from all academic disciplines and leading conservative intellectuals for ISI’s premier, all-expenses-paid, weeklong undergraduate fellowship!

The ISI Honors Program stands out as one of the most prestigious and enriching undergraduate fellowships for intellectually ambitious students across the country. The conference offers students an introduction to a lifelong community of conservatives. During the conference, students learn the great works of the Western canon and the history of the American conservative tradition. Our top-tier professors and speakers serve as mentors to help to further students’ academic and professional careers throughout the entire week.

Graduates of the ISI Honors Program join an exclusive fellowship of conservative leaders who are equipped and empowered to remedy what ails American institutions today. We aim to cultivate more than influential policymakers: ISI shapes prudent, principled statesmen and women who bring a clear-eyed historical sensibility to their decision-making. Our Honors Scholars go on to shape culture through their virtuous leadership across a wide variety of industries.

Each year’s cohort boasts ambitious, driven students who remain involved with ISI long after the week concludes. Click the link below to meet last year’s Honors Scholars.

Meet the 2025 Honors Scholars

2026 Theme: Is There an American Conservative Mind?

ISI’s 2026 Honors Conference is centered around Russell Kirk’s masterpiece, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Described by Whittaker Chambers as “the most important book of the 20th century,” this text was essential in establishing a coherent conservative tradition from Burke to the New Humanists and beyond.

Kirk outlines six canons of conservatism:

The belief in transcendent order
The “variety and mystery” of human life
The need for class divisions in society
The link between private property and freedom
Adherence to custom and convention
The political value of prudence

His text also addresses the impact of specific statesmen, authors, scholars, and philosophers throughout European and American history who shaped these values.

The weeklong program will ask the defining question: Is there a conservative mind that governs American life? If such an idea did exist, does it still? What changed?

The program’s core lectures are led by distinguished professors from across the country. Students have the opportunity to learn in seminar-style discussion groups led by a professor, and students go on group cultural excursions throughout the week. The conference is designed to equip students to apply the ideas and insights they learn to modern challenges on their own campuses and beyond.

Details

Aug 2-8, 2026

Linda L. Bean Center
3901 Centerville Road

Wilmington , DE , 19807

Speakers

Andrew Willard Jones

Andrew Willard Jones holds a PhD in Medieval History from Saint Louis University with a focus on the Church of the High Middle Ages. Jones’s work is primarily concerned with historical political theology and with the reconciliation of the post-modern with the pre-modern. Methodologically, his work treats history as a theological discipline and not as a secular archaeology. Jones is the author of Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in St. Louis IX’s Sacramental Kingdom and the one-volume history of the Catholic Church, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics. He is also working on an overview of the Church’s social teaching.

Bradley Watson

Bradley C. S. Watson teaches in the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC. He is a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute, a longtime board member of the National Association of Scholars, and a past president of The Philadelphia Society. He has authored or edited many books, including Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea (Notre Dame).

Khalil M. Habib

Khalil Habib is Associate Professor of Politics at Hillsdale College, where he teaches political philosophy and American political thought.

Luke Foster

Luke Foster is Assistant Professor of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought in 2022.

Patrick J. Deneen

Patrick J. Deneen, who earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers, is a professor at Notre Dame and an author on political thought. He worked in the White House as a speechwriter, taught at Princeton and Georgetown, and lectures worldwide on politics.

Sarah Gustafson

Sarah Gustafson is an Assistant Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America. Her research and teaching interests focus on Alexis de Tocqueville and the Western political philosophy tradition more broadly. She earned her PhD from Harvard University in 2023 and an MA in the History of Political Thought from Queen Mary University of London, where she won the 2015 University of London Quentin Skinner Prize in the History of Political Thought.

Zachary Porcu

Dr. Zachary Porcu earned his PhD in Church history at the Catholic University of America and holds additional degrees in Philosophy, Classics, and Interdisciplinary Humanities. He hosts the Roots of Everything podcast and is the author of Journey to Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age.

2026 Honors Conference