Union Internationale des Académies / International Academic Union
Year of Foundation: 1919
Year of Affiliation to CIPSH: 1949
President: Prof. Samuel Lieu
Founded in the wake of WWI in Paris in 1919, the Union Académique Internationale (UAI)—International Union of Academies consists of national and international academies (or equivalent institutions) engaged in research in the humanities and social sciences.
At present, the UAI comprises around hundred member institutions from about sixty countries at all continents. The UAI’s financial resources are generated from these institutions, as well as from private or public funds.
From its inception, UAI’s mission has been to promote international cooperation in the humanities across cultural and political borders. Motivated by a concern for cultural policy, the UAI was a founding member of the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (ICPHS/CIPSH) and is also a member of the International Social Science Council (ISSC).
The UAI’s practical objective is to initiate, evaluate and, within its means, to support financially long-term international collaborative scholarly enterprises – projects of a scope and size that cannot be handled by a single academy. Projects fall into six sections: European Language and Literatures, The Greco-Roman World, Oriental Studies (by now the section with the greatest number of projects), History of Civilizations, History of Thought, History of Art. Typically, projects result in printed and/or electronic reference tools like source collections, critical editions, catalogues, encyclopedias, dictionaries etc.
The oldest and biggest project of the UAI, still going strong, is the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Other projects are the Dictionary of Medieval Latin, Corpus of Coptic manuscripts, Encyclopedia Iranica, Encyclopedia of Indian Poetics, the Corpus of pre-Columbian American Antiquities, China and the Mediterranean World.
Since its foundation, the UAI has initiated or supported approximately over 80 scholarly projects. Over a century, more than 3000 books have been published under its patronage.
Website: www.uai-iua.org