ISLE is located in Sri Lanka, a politically turbulent but socially congenial and astonishingly beautiful country located on a tropical island (the size of West Virginia) in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, just off the southern tip of India. Its Sinhala Buddhist culture is the oldest continuing Buddhist civilization in the world, yet modern Sri Lanka is a very diverse and extraordinarily complex society. Economically, it is a developing nation. Politically, it is democratic.

Since 1982, ISLE has introduced over 280 American undergraduate students from Bates, Bowdoin, Carleton, Colby, Grinnell, Holy Cross, Swarthmore and Whitman colleges to Sri Lanka's history, archaeology, environment, society, religion, literature, language, politics, economics, and art. Many ISLE students have subsequently returned to Sri Lanka for further studies on Fulbright grants or within the context of graduate study programs in the humanities and social sciences.