Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium

Funded as a National Resource Center since 1985, the Cornell-Syracuse Consortium comprises two centers: the South Asia Program located in the Einaudi Center for International Studies (CIS) at Cornell University, and the South Asia Center located at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. The Consortium administers the Title VI NRC grant and coordinates the activities of the two centers, whose mission is to promote a better understanding of the histories, cultures, and contemporary affairs of the countries of South Asia through research, teaching and service. The Consortium also facilitates the sharing of curricula and graduate advising between campuses, and promotes the unified, consortia activities described below.

Cornell, the land grant institution for New York State, and an unusual blend of private and public educational units, and Syracuse, a private research university with thirteen different schools and colleges, provides a wide variety of academic options in which South Asian studies can be pursued. The Consortium offers regular instruction in Bengali, Hindi-Urdu, Nepali, Pali, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Tamil, and South Asian studies in a broad range of academic disciplines from Ethnomusicology and Film Studies to Plant Breeding and Rural Development. Instruction is provided by a world-renowned faculty whose aggregate expertise ranges even more broadly than the instructional programs they cover.

The special excellence of the Consortium lie in its interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary orientation, especially in its commingling of traditional area studies with a predominant strength in applied and professional approaches to the study of contemporary South Asia. The Consortium is, for example, arguably the strongest center in the country for the study of the political economy of the region. The Consortium is also unusual among South Asia Centers for its strength of coverage of South Asian countries other than India, as exemplified by the Consortium's leading role in the teaching of Sinhala, Nepali, and Bengali. Other axes of shared academic interest and excellence that constitute special strengths are: 1) Language, Linguistics, Language Acquisition, and Communication; 2) Religion, Society, and Gender; 3) Environment, Culture, and Policy; 4) Architecture, City Planning, and Industrial Relations; and 5) Rural Development.

The two partners in the Consortium complement each other's relative strengths in South Asian Studies, with Cornell relatively stronger in the social sciences and in the study of Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and Syracuse relatively stronger in the humanities and in the study of India. In the coming grant period, the Consortium hopes to use these strengths to focus some of its academic and outreach activities on teaching training activities, and keeping in mind recent global events, Islamic South Asia. FLAS fellowships will also be awarded keeping the invitational priorities in mind, with a view to strengthening the training of specialists in areas important for US security.

The Consortium's Library aggregate collection of 545,974 books and 9,313 serials and periodicals constitute one of the largest collections in the country. This well-managed and well-integrated collection is available to the general public in our open libraries and stacks.

Our Outreach programs target undeserved communities of the region and country, especially the rural secondary schools and four-year college teachers of the Central New York and Pennsylvania region.

To learn more about our resources and cultural events, please visit our website. For more detailed information about a particular program or event, please feel free to contact us by phone (607) 255-8493 or e-mail us at SAP@einaudi.cornell.edu.