About Us
The Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS) is a central research institution at Heidelberg University founded in 2019. The HCIAS was designed at the intersection of the University’s strategic fields of research in the humanities and the social and behavioral sciences, the Fields of Focus 3 and 4, to complement Heidelberg University’s well-established regional studies on South Asia, East Asia, North America, and Europe. Against this background, the HCIAS aims to further develop the profile of Area Studies at Heidelberg and build a comprehensive framework for collaborative research, study and teaching, as well as knowledge transfer on, with, and in Ibero-America. As an interdisciplinary central research institution for Ibero-American Studies, the HCIAS serves as Heidelberg’s cornerstone for building bridges to Ibero-America. In both its structure and infrastructure, it collaborates closely with the Heidelberg Center Latin America (HCLA) in Santiago de Chile, while broadening and reinforcing the university’s academic networks through region-specific expertise across all fields of scholarly activity.
The HCIAS conceives of Ibero-America as a dynamic, interconnected macro-region in dialogue with other world regions. Our research and teaching focus on Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula but explicitly include the historical, cultural, political, or socioeconomic ties to other areas. The HCIAS’ approach to Area Studies is interdisciplinary and critically situated, remaining attentive to local meanings, power relations, and institutional settings, while critically reassessing area boundaries in light of digitally networked public spheres and ongoing processes of digitalization. It integrates perspectives from the social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies and combines context-sensitive insights from area studies with the systematic rigor of comparative methods to enable cross-regional research.