The UCLA Center for Modern and Contemporary Studies promotes humanistic research and provides a forum for scholarship concerned with 19th- and 20th-century society and culture.

While European and American studies are basic to the Center's mission, the range of interests has no geographical boundaries. Our approach is interdisciplinary, including the relation of the humanities to the social, biological, and physical sciences. But we assume that such an approach can be fruitful only when exciting, innovative work continues to occur in specialized academic disciplines.

The activities of the Center will thus be focused on exploring relations and intersections between disciplines, and the grounds for such conjunctions may be historical, cultural or theoretical. To these ends, the Center will sponsor small seminars, mid-size workshops, larger public lectures, conferences and various special events.

The Center houses the UC Transnational & Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group, an interdisciplinary community of scholars in the humanities and the social sciences from throughout the University of California system. The group's common purpose is to collaborate on the study of minority discourse across national boundaries (transnational) with attention to colonial and neocolonial processes (transcolonial). The group also sponsors seminars, lectures, and conferences.