The Centre for Intercultural Studies has developed out of the University of Glasgow's Centre for Intercultural Germanistics, which was established in 1992 with Professor R.H. Stephenson as its founding director, and with the aim of broadening the conceptual framework of German Studies by taking "culture" as its key-idea. The foundation was marked by a lecture given by the distinguished philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, and for the following 12 years the Centre has conducted a regular series of research seminars, attracting speakers from home and abroad; and organised 3 national and 5 international conferences in collaboration with other university German departments - all in a sustained effort to elaborate a thematic approach, in both synchronic and diachronic dimensions, to the German cultural tradition. Since 1992, an M.Phil. programme (in "Modern German Thought") has been set up, 7 intercultural Ph.D.'s completed, and over 70 journal articles, 9 monographs and 8 volumes of collected papers have been published by members of the Centre. In April 2000, the Inaugural Ernst Cassirer Lecture by Professor John Krois of the Humboldt-Universität Berlin opened  up close cooperation between the Centre and Universities of Berlin, Hamburg and Yale, focusing on the filiation in German and English-speaking intellectual life in the cultural theory of Weimar Classicism. His paper has been published in Goethe 2000, the proceedings of a conference organised by the Centre in 1999 to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Goethe. Now, given the creation in the University of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, the Cassirer-based focus of the Centre's activities, and the inclusion in the Centre of colleagues from Departments outside German, the Centre for Intercultural Germanistics has been renamed the Centre for Intercultural Studies, which more accurately reflects the larger ambitions of the Centre in future years.