The Center for South Asia Studies (CSAS) supports teaching, research, and outreach activities relating to South Asia at UC Berkeley. The only US Department of Education-funded National Resource Center for South Asia in California, CSAS is committed to enhancing knowledge of the region among students, academics, and the public at large. UC Berkeley has been a premier site for the study of South Asia in general, and India in particular, for the past century (Sanskrit courses date back to 1906). With over 40 faculty members conducting research in the area of South Asia studies, Berkeley offers 85 to 120 courses with significant India content every semester, and instruction in over six Indian languages. The University of California, Berkeley, is recognized as one of the top universities in the United States and was recently ranked as the second greatest university in the world by the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Department of South & South East Asian Studies
Our department was founded as a Department of South and Southeast Asian Languages and Literatures. While we have grown into an interdisciplinary area studies department with specialized coverage of history, religion, and culture, our emphasis on textual traditions remains fundamental. We are committed to language training at the highest level, and to research that foregrounds textual analysis and archival sensitivity.
While our faculty and students are specialists and tend to focus in our research on specific disciplines, periods, and particular literary or national traditions, we all believe in the importance of thinking comparatively across the region of South and Southeast Asia. We understand that scholarly insight comes from interdisciplinary work and the ability to make that work relevant to a broadly trained community of scholars. We are a small department covering a third of humanity. We conduct research and lead classes where a high degree of specialization and focus is framed with the broader ability to think comparatively and synthetically. In this we are rooted in the best of Berkeley’s humanities and liberal arts traditions.
We offer training in 14 languages, and undergraduate and graduate degree programs in the histories, religions, cultures and textual traditions of a third of the world’s population. Our faculty specializes in all periods from the classical to the modern, in the fields of literature, history, and religious studies, and conducts research in India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
