American Center for Mongolian Studies

The ACMS was incorporated in 2002 in Austin, Texas and established its home office at Austin College. It moved its home office to Western Washington University in 2003, and opened its Mongolia office in 2004, which is currently housed in the School of Foreign Affairs at the National University of Mongolia. From the fall of 2009 to Spring 2014, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for East Asian Studies provided logistical support for the home office. In 2014, the ACMS moved offices to the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mongolian Studies scholars and discipline based Mongolian researchers were instrumental in the establishment of the ACMS, and the United States Department of Education, United States Embassy in Mongolia, and Council for American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) contributed significant financial resources to establish and operate the ACMS Mongolia office.

In November 2013 the ACMS Mongolia office moved to its current location inside the East Entrance of Natsagdorj Library in Ulaanbaatar.

Mongolia was overlooked in much of the congressional spending legislation produced in the post-Soviet era, such as the Fulbright-Hays Title VIII program. As a consequence direct US government support for the field of Mongolian Studies dwindled relative to other area studies throughout the 1990s, and institutional support for discipline-based research in Mongolia was not well organized. In spite of this, between 1990 and 2003 over 70 PhD dissertations and Masters theses were written at US universities about topics related to Mongolia or involving Mongolia as the context of the research. The ACMS was founded with the intention of providing the institutional support to address these resources issues and organize research produced in the region.