The University of California, Santa Barbara has received a $750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish a nationally focused, interdisciplinary centre for South Asian American studies, aiming to give the field a more structured academic foundation and address a longstanding lack of institutional support. The project was initiated after the foundation approached the university in August last year. It will be led by Jigna Desai and Sameer Pandya, professors in UCSB’s Department of Asian American Studies.Pandya, who chairs the department, is also a bestselling novelist, while Desai is the inaugural director of the university’s Center for Feminist Futures.Desai said having two specialists in South Asian American studies within the same Asian American studies department was unusual.“It’s a real rarity to have two people who do South Asian American studies in an Asian American studies department,” she said.The grant seeks to address a gap in higher education. Although Asian American studies programs have expanded across the US over the past two decades, dedicated resources for South Asian American studies research remain limited. Scholars in the field often lack established academic pathways, specialised coursework and structured mentorship.“In a way, the field has been in existence for 30 years in a space between post-colonial studies…and the rise of Asian American Studies,” Pandya said. “And so there’s never been a clear, dedicated space for South Asian American studies.”One of the centre’s priorities will be to expand research into issues that have received less attention within broader Asian American studies, including caste and its role in the South Asian diaspora.While caste has long been studied in the context of the South Asian subcontinent, its influence on migrant communities and across generations of South Asians living in the US and Europe requires further examination.“Caste is one of those categories, and specifically caste in relation to migration, but also how it plays a highly present force in shaping people’s lives in the diaspora,” Desai said.
Jigna Desai and Sameer Pandya will co-lead a new South Asian American studies center. (Photo: UCSB/Jeff Liang)
Over the next four years, the $750,000 grant will support initiatives in four areas: undergraduate curriculum development and learning opportunities, graduate training and research support, mentorship for junior faculty, and partnerships with public-facing projects.Planned programmes include open-access online curricula, summer internships for undergraduates, dissertation fellowships and manuscript workshops.The broader aim is to bring together a field whose researchers have often worked independently and establish a lasting academic community connecting senior scholars, early-career faculty members and students.“We like the collective noisiness of the current conversation in a way that before we were all just working on our own, trying to figure it all out,” Pandya said.The centre’s inaugural event brought together 20 scholars from across the US for a symposium examining power, dominance and complicity within South Asian American studies.The gathering helped strengthen connections among researchers at different career stages and included workshops to develop scholarship for a forthcoming edited collection on critical South Asian American studies..UCSB’s interdisciplinary Department of Asian American Studies is part of the broader Ethnic Studies tradition. The department focuses on collaborative knowledge production, bringing historically marginalised voices into academic discussions and advancing social justice