The Department of Spanish and Portuguese is home to a range of centers and laboratories that support advanced research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and cultural programming. These research hubs provide dynamic spaces for scholarly exchange, bring together faculty, students, and visiting scholars, and foster innovative work across languages, literatures, cultures, and related fields. Through research projects, events, publications, and community engagement, they contribute to the intellectual life of the department while promoting linguistic and cultural diversity within the university and beyond.
Center for Catalan Studies
Center for Portuguese Studies
The Bilingualism, Translation, and Cognition Laboratory
The Transborder Culture Laboratory
The Center for Catalan Studies (CCS) at UC Santa Barbara, promotes the study and dissemination of Catalan language and culture through research, teaching, academic exchange, and international collaboration. Founded by Antonio Cortijo Ocaña (UC Santa Barbara) and Vicent Martines (University of Alicante), the center operates through a cooperative agreement between both universities. With headquarters at UCSB and the University of Alicante’s La Nucía campus, the CCS supports comparative research on Catalan-speaking regions within broader Iberian, Mediterranean, and Transatlantic contexts. The Center also collaborates with IVITRA and Digicotracam, major initiatives in translation studies, digital humanities, linguistics, literature, education, pedagogy, and research.
The Center for Portuguese Studies (CPS) at UC Santa Barbara promotes the study and dissemination of the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. Located in Phelps Hall 3206 and 3208, the Center was founded with an endowment from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and supports students, teaching, research, and academic activities related to Portuguese-speaking communities worldwide. Its programs include scholarships and stipends, Portuguese language instruction, colloquia, publications, and library resources. With support from Portuguese, American, and international institutions, individuals, and alumni, the Center advances knowledge of Lusophone cultures and strengthens Portuguese Studies in California, the United States, and beyond.
The Bilingualism, Translation, and Cognition Laboratory (BTCL) examines the cognitive processes underlying bilingualism, translation, and interpretation. The Laboratory studies how diverse bilingual experiences influence behavior and group interactions using eye-tracking, behavioral measures, and other experimental methods. Located in 4325 Phelps Hall, BTCL collaborates with language service providers, neuroscientists, and translation professionals to connect research with professional practice. Its work seeks to improve communication and accessibility for bilingual individuals and communities, with particular attention to high-impact settings such as healthcare, law, and education, where effective multilingual communication can play an especially important role in access, understanding, and outcomes for diverse populations.
The Transborder Culture Laboratory (TCL) is an interdisciplinary research and creative platform dedicated to the study, documentation, and production of cultural practices emerging from transborder existence, exchange, and experience. Based at UC Santa Barbara, the Laboratory focuses particularly on the Tijuana–San Diego region and the broader migratory Pacific, approaching the transborder not simply as a geographic condition but as a lived cultural experience shaped by movement across languages, territories, communities, and systems of knowledge. Bringing together academic research, artistic practice, cultural archives, and community engagement, the TCL fosters collaborations among scholars, artists, students, and transborder communities through research projects, exhibitions, publications, workshops, and bilingual public programming.