Mission

UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies promotes and sustains transdisciplinary studies of the periods from the 3rd to the 17th century C.E. across the globe. The Center’s mission is grounded in the disciplinary study of early periods and worlds (late antique, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern). Five main research axes structure the multi-faceted inquiry of the Center’s diverse faculty: Sustainability-Repurposing; Fluidity-Permanence; Bodies-Performance; Conversion-Mobility; and Communication-Archive.

This research platform is open to the widest variety of historical and methodological approaches. It enables a transdisciplinary and global research model in response to the challenge of regional world systems and the plurality of early worlds. That is, in addition to the narratives of spatial and/or temporal connectivities, the research platform of connected methodologies and epistemologies and comparison facilitates the study of a range of shared and global phenomena in an unconnected and early-connected world.

The Center has three primary goals:
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, logistical, and other support; and,
3. To create and disseminate knowledge, encourage intellectual exchange, and promote study of the early global periods and worlds at the campus, local, regional, national, and global levels.

CMRS-CEGS is dedicated to promoting research, teaching, and new methodologies 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.