California Studies

The University of California California Studies Consortium (UCCSC) supported collaborative research by UC faculty, graduate students, and their colleagues at other institutions as part of a systemwide California Studies research initiative for the humanities, arts and social sciences. UCCSC was governed by a steering committee of faculty representatives from various UC campuses. It offered competitive grants totaling nearly $80,000 annually to support collaborative research projects, campus-community programming, and graduate travel for research.

The initiative sought to bring together the many interesting projects and discussions afoot on most of the UC campuses and to facilitate their development and elaboration in robust and creative ways by providing support for new projects to emerge. This systemwide multicampus approach to California Studies aims to sustain innovative scholarship, teaching and outreach.

UCCSC supported comprehensive critical mappings and re-mappings of California and its cultures. It places California as a site of global intersections and circulations—culturally, economically, and politically. This research initiative supported projects invested in sustained, multidisciplinary, and differently situated notions of intersection, power, history, language, migration and movement. UCCSC supplements a more traditional sense of California Studies by dealing squarely with questions of public pedagogy that address the antagonisms comprising what it means to be a “Californian.”