The University of California, Santa Barbara, has received a $750,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a new, nationally focused, interdisciplinary center for South Asian American studies. This four-year initiative aims to provide critical institutional support for a field that has historically lacked a centralized academic infrastructure. The center will be led by Jigna Desai and Sameer Pandya, both professors in UCSB’s Department of Asian American Studies. Desai also serves as the inaugural director of the university’s Center for Feminist Futures, and Pandya chairs the department and is a bestselling novelist.
The grant is designated to support the development of a systematic framework for research, teaching, and scholarly collaboration. Its goal is to bring together academics and students from various disciplines to advance the study of South Asian American experiences. A central priority for the initiative is to expand research into subjects that have received comparatively limited attention within broader Asian American studies frameworks, particularly caste. While caste analysis is well-established in scholarship on the South Asian subcontinent, its operation within the global South Asian diaspora remains an area requiring further investigation. The initiative will also examine how caste relations and experiences manifest across generations and processes of acculturation in American and European societies.
Over the next four years, Professors Desai and Pandya plan to direct the funding toward four key areas. These include undergraduate curriculum development and learning opportunities, graduate training and research support, mentorship for junior faculty, and partnerships with public-facing projects. Specific activities planned under the initiative encompass developing open-access online curricula, creating summer internship opportunities for undergraduates, providing dissertation fellowships, and organizing manuscript workshops. These efforts are designed to strengthen the pipeline of scholars entering the field while simultaneously making research and educational resources more widely accessible to a broader audience.
Beyond the specific programs, the initiative seeks a broader transformation: converting a currently dispersed network of scholars into a sustainable academic community. This new community will have lasting institutional support, connecting established researchers, early-career faculty, and students. The center aims to create new opportunities for collaboration and develop a shared intellectual foundation for South Asian American studies. Pandya has underscored the significance of fostering a robust intellectual community by bringing scholars at different career stages together. The Mellon Foundation’s investment is intended to provide the necessary resources to build this community through sustained programming, research support, and interdisciplinary engagement.
This initiative marks a significant step toward establishing South Asian American studies as a more cohesive and enduring area of academic inquiry. It is expected to expand the field’s capacity to investigate complex questions of identity, migration, caste, and generational change across the global diaspora.
