The Institute of Culture (IUC) was set up in 1994 in order to create an interdisciplinary framework for organising teaching and research activities designed to promote humanistic culture studies. The IUC's main aim is to carry out activities to do with interdisciplinary and comparative studies in the sphere of art, literature and philosophical thought that will enable it to perform its duties: third-cycle teaching, research and the dissemination of knowledge in the field of humanistic culture.

The IUC's efforts focus on offering a response to one of the biggest challenges facing the world now and in the future: bringing together the philosophical, artistic and literary cultures that shape the humanistic universe of our tradition; the cultures that determine the substrata of our world, East and West; humanistic culture and scientific culture; and the scenarios in which our identity is shaped (Barcelona, Catalonia, the Iberian world, the Mediterranean world, Europe). The central axis of what the Institute does, therefore, consists in a reflection on this multiple perspective as a platform for analysing the present and the immediate future.