The Humanities and World Cultures Institute was chartered by the University of Central Arkansas Board of Trustees and the Arkansas State Department of Higher Education in April 2002 both to support the development of interdisciplinary curricula that will help students function in an increasingly global and technological world, and to facilitate the university's sharing the richness of the humanities with the larger central Arkansas community.

The Institute supplements the curricular efforts of the established disciplines by coordinating five minors that cross traditional departmental boundaries: African/African American Studies, Asian Studies, Gender Studies, Latin American Studies, and Southern and Arkansas Studies. Under its Visiting Humanities Scholars program, it hosts specialists in these areas who come to UCA to do workshops for faculty and students or to lecture on topics of interest to students of world cultures. And the Institute supports the efforts of faculty trained in Anglo-American and European cultural disciplines as they extend their purchase of African, Asian and Latin-American culture, both by arranging their participation in development workshops and by coordinating dialogue groups for colleagues wishing to explore select topics.

The Institute reaches beyond the immediate university community by coordinating an annual Foreign Culture Festival that includes lectures, gallery shows, film screenings, and recitals; by sponsoring an annual Humanities Fair for high school students; and by offering summer workshops or courses for high school teachers wishing to broaden the non-Anglo-American and non-European portions of their curricula. In 2003, UCA was named a regional center of the Asian Studies Development Program of the federally funded East-West Center, allowing the Institute to sponsor educational activities in Asian studies for the larger mid-South central region.