Mission and Axis-Based Research

Our Mission

UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies promotes and sustains transdisciplinary studies of the period from the third to the seventeenth century CE across the globe. The Center applies a new global research model to the challenge of regional world systems, that is, the plurality of early worlds. Five main research axes structure the polyvalent and multifaceted inquiry of the Center’s diverse faculty: Sustainability-Repurposing, Fluidity-Permanence, Bodies-Performance, Conversion-Mobility, and Communication-Archive. All research axes are open to the widest variety of historical and methodological approaches.

What are methodologically either cognitive dissonances or concordances are epistemologically a range of shared and global phenomena in an unconnected and early connected world. The Center’s mission is thus grounded in the traditional academic boundaries necessary to the specialized study of the early worlds, while its platform of connected methodologies and epistemologies, in addition to the narrative of spatial and/or temporal connectivities, provides transdisciplinary training and methodological cross-pollination across fields and disciplines, departments, and divisions. Methodology and comparison connect distinct areas of the globe.

The Center has three primary goals:

1. 1. To stimulate and support the scholarship and research activities of its affiliated faculty, associates, students, and scholars;
   2. To foster and prepare the next generation of scholars and researchers by providing educational opportunities and financial and other support; and,
   3. To disseminate knowledge, encourage intellectual exchange, and promote late antique, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern studies at the campus, local, regional, national, and global levels.

CMRS-CEGS is dedicated to promoting research, teaching, and new methodologies, both in underrepresented and nontraditional areas of study and in traditional fields and frameworks. It is guided by the conviction that without the study of the past, the present and the future are inaccessible and opaque.

Current Thematic Priorities

The Center has put forward a set of thematic priorities for a two-year cycle (AY 2026–27 and 2027–28):

• • Community/Discord
  • Decay/Renewal
  • Memory/Oblivion
  • Wonder

Designed to encourage, rather than to limit, these themes offer resonant anchors for our work. They can be taken up as standalone themes or can be combined in different ways, e.g. Community and Oblivion, Wonder and Renewal, Discord and Memory. The themes are intended as large containers to be shaped according to specific interests.

Our History

CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, an Organized Research Unit of the University of California, was founded in 1963 as the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Since September 2021, it has been called the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, or CMRS-CEGS. The original proposal by UCLA History Professor Lynn White Jr. established the foundational principles and continued focus that the Center’s current work expands upon. We hope to reinvigorate and honor Professor White’s scholarly outlook and intellectual scope as well as that of the other faculty who joined him in establishing the Center.

Lynn White Jr. argued for the establishment of CMRS in 1963 because

during the past two decades medieval and Renaissance studies have both greatly broadened and at the same time tended to converge. These movements of scholarship have opened up new questions that require a degree of collaboration among experts with very diverse competencies such as could scarcely have been envisaged a generation ago.

CMRS-CEGS’s plans for the future align with his original assessment that

the Middle Ages are no longer an intelligible unit if defined simply as the phase of Occidental culture extending from the victory of Christianity to the overseas expansion of Western Europe,

a conception that he believed impacted equally the understanding of the Renaissance and of antiquity:

Functionally the old division between medieval and Renaissance scholarship has lost much of its significance. They are now a unified field of investigation. The new view of the Middle Ages and Renaissance has likewise expanded understanding of the implications of classical studies.

In a historical twist, as is often the case, present times imitate the gestures of the past.

Professor White’s scholarship focusing on medieval technology, social change, religion, and the historical roots of the present ecological crisis is enjoying renewed interest. For example:

• • https://www.noemamag.com/the-conscious-universe/
  • https://muse.jhu.edu/article/777619
  • https://www.scu.edu/environmental-ethics/environmental-activists-heroes-and-martyrs/lynn-white.html
  • https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cobi.12735

Leadership History

Current Director

2019–present
Zrinka Stahuljak

Previous Directors

2011–2019
Massimo Ciavolella

2004–2011
Brian P. Copenhaver

2003–2004
Michael J. B. Allen

1998–2003
Henry Ansgar Kelly

1993–1998
Patrick J. Geary

1988–1993
Michael J. B. Allen

1972–1988
Fredi Chiappelli

1970–1972
William Matthews

1963–1970
Lynn White Jr.