Mellon Foundation Awards $750,000 To UCSB For South Asian American Studies Center

Photo: UCSB/Jeff Liang

India-West News Desk

SANTA BARBARA, CA – The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of California, Santa Barbara, $750,000 to establish a nationally focused, interdisciplinary center dedicated to South Asian American studies, providing new institutional support for a field that has historically lacked a centralized academic infrastructure.

The four-year initiative 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. Desai serves as the inaugural director of the university’s Center for Feminist Futures.

The grant will support the development of a systematic framework for research, teaching and scholarly collaboration, bringing together academics and students working across disciplines to advance the study of South Asian American experiences.

A central priority is expanding research into subjects that have received comparatively limited attention within broader Asian American studies frameworks, including caste. Although caste analysis has an established place in scholarship on the South Asian subcontinent, its operation within the global South Asian diaspora remains an area for further investigation. The initiative will also examine how caste relations and experiences vary across generations and processes of acculturation in American and European societies.

Over the next four years, Desai and Pandya plan to direct funding toward four areas: undergraduate curriculum development and learning opportunities, graduate training and research support, mentorship for junior faculty, and partnerships with public-facing projects.

Planned activities include developing open-access online curricula, creating summer internship opportunities for undergraduates, providing dissertation fellowships and organizing manuscript workshops. Together, these efforts are intended to strengthen the pipeline of scholars entering the field while making research and educational resources more widely accessible.

Beyond individual programs, the initiative seeks to transform a dispersed network of scholars into a sustainable academic community with lasting institutional support. By connecting established researchers, early-career faculty and students, the center aims to create opportunities for collaboration and develop a shared intellectual foundation for South Asian American studies.

Pandya has emphasized the importance of bringing scholars at different career stages together to foster a robust intellectual community. The Mellon Foundation’s investment will provide the resources to build that community through sustained programming, research support and interdisciplinary engagement.

The initiative represents a significant step toward establishing South Asian American studies as a more cohesive and enduring area of academic inquiry, expanding the field’s capacity to investigate questions of identity, migration, caste and generational change across the global diaspora.