Several types of interdisciplinary academic programs offered each year are designed to explore the latest research in the early modern period or in some of the special areas represented in the Clark's collections.

Center/Clark Professorship
One or more distinguished scholars are appointed each year to the Center/Clark Professorship; tenure ranges from one quarter to an academic year, depending on the number of appointments. The Center/Clark Professor, in collaboration with the Director, organizes academic programs consisting of public lectures, seminars, and workshops, and develops publications from them. If not already affiliated with UCLA, the Center/Clark Professor holds a visiting appointment in one of the departments and participates in its instructional activities.

Core Programs
The heart of the Center/Clark's academic activity is its core programs—series of interdisciplinary events developed around a common theme. This organizing principle allows for great flexibility in format and scope: core programs may range from three or four consecutive workshops to a series spanning a year or more, with a full complement of symposia, workshops, graduate seminars, and public lectures, held at the Clark or at UCLA. Core programs are organized each year by the current Center/Clark Professor or Professors, who are encouraged to design programs that will lead to publication in the Center/Clark series. The Center's Ahmanson-Getty theme-based fellowships are linked to the core programs as well.

Our current core program for 2009–2010 is:

Cultures Of Communication, Theologies Of Media In Early Modern Europe And Beyond
directed by Christopher Wild (UCLA) & Ulrike Strasser (UC Irvine)

Our program re-approaches the history of media in early modern Europe from an original and particularly timely perspective. It resists the technological focus and teleological pull of the Gutenberg galaxy that has long dominated scholarly investigations and concentrates instead on the multimediality of early modern cultures as well as the powerful religious and theological currents informing its communication and media. We suggest that the history of media in early modern Europe is best understood in its longue duree from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century and in reference to the long-term aftershocks of the Reformation and the profound transformation of both media and mediation the Reformation set in motion. The sixteenth-century reformers not only revolutionized the use of media, as has been noted before, but rather the Reformation itself arguably represents an early modern instantiation of media theory. Each camp developed theories and practices of optimizing "vertical communication" with the divine and "horizontal communication" among humanity. Consequently, the recourse to the different theologies of early modern reform can help us examine the complex and competing media cultures of the time. The transformation of media had a persistent corollary in the critique of mediation. Once unleashed, this critique would not go away, but would be reformulated throughout the early modern period and beyond, and in a host of contexts within and beyond the religious domain.

Against this backdrop, our conference cycle takes as its starting point the conjunction of Reformation theology and the rise of new media in the sixteenth century to then trace the ripple effects of these phenomena in the following centuries. It will feature programs on Theology as Media Theory; Media of Reform: Between the Local and the Global; Multimediality: Print Culture in Context; and Religious Media and the Birth of Aesthetics.

Our forthcoming core program for 2010–2011 is:

Cultures of Aestheticism—Before and After Oscar Wilde
directed by Clark Professor Joseph Bristow (UCLA)

Conferences and Workshops
The Center and the Clark organize and sponsor interdisciplinary conferences and workshops, usually at the Clark, which bring scholars from throughout the world to UCLA to explore specific issues and to develop innovative interpretative approaches. On occasion these symposia are arranged in association with other campus departments or with other institutions. Some of the proceedings are published, either in the Center/Clark series or in journals.

All programs for the current year can be viewed on our calendar.