Rooted in various fields of study, the IASA provides a space for comparative and interdisciplinary dialogues on and from American cultures and societies. To this purpose, it promotes the international exchange of ideas, scholarly agendas, and programmatic designs. It seeks to engender diverse sites of discourse, develop varied perspectives, foster debate, facilitate publications, and organize conferences dealing with America. The work of the IASA supports, complements, and internationalizes ongoing efforts by regional, national, and multinational associations of American Studies around the world and serves as focal point for individual scholars, centers, institutes, university departments and programs, as well as for national, regional, and continental associations.

The IASA is the only world-wide association of Americanists, and the sole global locus of convergence for diverse programmatic, disciplinary, ideological, and historically divergent approaches to America and the American sphere of influence around the world. The IASA is unique inasmuch as it emanates from the international community of scholars and, as an independent organization, it harbors no particular national, regional, or ideological agenda. Founded in a truly international convention, the IASA derives its intellectual, educational, and scholarly legitimacy from the diverse concerns and multiple interests of its world-wide membership.

The IASA welcomes individual, institutional, and associational memberships from all students, scholars, and teachers who work as Americanists in the social sciences, the humanities and the arts, as well as from intellectuals, artists, journalists, public officials, and all those active in matters concerning the study of America as diverse, multinational, global, and as transcultural phenomenon.