The Iberian Studies Program is an interdisciplinary initiative to promote relational knowledge of the various cultures of the Iberian Peninsula. Eschewing the narrowly national focus on state cultures, this initiative privileges the relations between those cultures and the territorial cultures which the nation-building process once demoted to regional status. In the modern period, no less than in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the Basque, the Catalan, and the Galician, have been major players, along with the Portuguese and the Castilian, in the consolidation of Iberia's position in modern Europe. With inchoate nation-building projects of their own, some of these "regional" cultures have been catalysts of Spain's modernization, democratization, and Europeanization. Today the Peninsula's historical function as a continental crossroads between Africa, Europe, and the Americas resurfaces in the wake of globalization, reactivating the political and cultural significance of its inhabitants' secular diversity. At the same time, the political articulation of this diversity (as in the case of the Euzkadi and Catalonia) interrogates the European Community about the nature of its political bond and about issues of membership, representation, inclusiveness, and subsidiarity.

The Iberian Studies Program is academically based on a new Iberian Studies emphasis in a revamped Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and its location within The Europe Center at FSI signifies the program's multidisciplinary scope. Via the TEC, it intersects with related programs, such as the Mediterranean Studies program at ICA, to further emphasize the position of the Iberian Studies Program at the heart of debates about contemporary Europe.