The Center for Catalan Studies / Centre d´Estudis Catalans (CSS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara was founded by Profs. Antonio Cortijo Ocaña (UCSB) and Vicent Martines (University of Alicante). As a joint initiative, the CCS is the result of an Agreement of Cooperation between the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Universitat d´Alacant (University of Alicante). The Agreement aims at the dissemination of Catalan culture through research and teaching, the exchange of faculty and students, and the co-organization of international symposia.
The Center has two headquarters: the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCSB; and the Universitat d´Alacant / La Nucía campus (https://web.ua.es/es/seus/lanucia/). Through its association with the Universitat d´Alacant (Departament de Filologia Catalana), the Center is also part of the Institut Superior d'Investigació Cooperativa Institut Virtual de Traducció / IVITRA (a Center of the Universitat d´Alacant devoted to the analysis of Translation, Applied Linguistics, Literary Studies, Theory and Practice of Translation, ICT and Education; http://www.ivitra.ua.es/) and Digicotracam (a major Digital Humanities project sponsored by the Generalitat Valenciana and the European Union Prometeo Projects; http://www.digicotracam.ua.es/).
The Center for Catalan Studies (CCS) is a self-financed research and teaching unit. We envision the CCS as a research unit within the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese (UCSB) intent on analyzing and disseminating the language and culture of the Catalan speaking regions from a comparative Iberian Peninsula perspective. The Center´s mission is the analysis and study of the language and culture of the territories of the old Crown of Aragon (Catalonia proper, València, Balearic Islands, Italy [Naples, Sicily, Sardegna, Corsica], Greece [Duchies of Athens and Neopatria]) within a broad Mediterranean and Transatlantic perspective.
The Center is closely associated with the Institut Virtual de Traducció (Universitat d´Alacant) and with the Internationales Institut für Iberisches Studien (Institut für Romanistik) (Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg), directed by Prof. Hans-Ingo Radatz.In addition, the Center for Catalan Studies (CCS) is also coordinated with BITECA (http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/philobiblon/biteca_en.html).