South Asia Area Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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People/South Asia Area Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
People/South Asia Area Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Center for South Asia
The Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a community of faculty and staff dedicated to promoting greater understanding of South Asian history, language, religion and culture through diverse academic disciplines, a summer language institute, an annual conference, student organizations and outreach programs.
The origins of South Asian studies at UW-Madison reach back nearly 120 years to when William Holme Williams held a professorship of Sanskrit in the Department of Ancient Languages in the mid-1880s. The formal Department of Indian Studies was established in 1958, following trips to India by faculty members Henry Hart and Murray Fowler in 1953–56.
In 1986 the UW-Madison South Asia program received a $150,000 endowment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which included matching funds from the College of Letters and Science and further matching endowment through donors to the Tibetan Buddhist Studies program.
In addition to its academic programs, the Center has functioned as a publisher of scholarly monographs in the field of South Asian studies. The Center's library holdings include Tibetan language texts housed in a dedicated Tibetan Collection, alongside rare South Asian manuscripts in Special Collections. The Center is now known simply as the Center for South Asia and maintains its website at southasia.wisc.edu.
