University of ChicagoSouth Asia NRC and FLAS Proposal, 2000-2003C1
1. Quality of the Applicant's Non-Language Instructional Program
The Chicago South Asia program began in the nineteen fifties, impelled by the intellectual creativity of the anthropologists Robert Redfield and Milton Singer. They brought together colleagues with South Asia interests in the social sciences and the humanities in order to explore ideas of Civilization, high culture and folk culture. Their intellectual agendas informed the ChicagoSouthAsiaCenter for three decades. Following the recent retirement of several faculty who gave substance to the founders' visions, the Center is reinventing itself through new appointments and the development of new intellectual and pedagogic agenda. The newly appointed faculty of the last nine years, Sheldon Pollock, Arjun Appadurai, Kathleen Morrison, Bruce Lincoln, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Martha Nussbaum, Homi Bhabha, and John Kelly, are propelling South Asian studies in new directions. We see this in their work on new questions concerning ethnicity, religion, gender, identity, the subaltern, the transnational flows of persons and images, the media, and popular forms of communication.
The University of Chicago is a private university of 14,517 students strongly weighted toward graduate teaching, with 3,915 undergraduates to 4,198 graduate students in the humanities, social and hard sciences. There are 5,413 students in professional schools and 919 in non-degree programs. It is one of the world’s great intellectual communities and centers of learning. At one to seven, the University has the highest teacher student ratio of all the private universities with which it compares itself. Its greatest strength is as a teacher of teachers. It produces undergraduates who go on to graduate and professional schools at an unparalleled rate (95%), and graduate students most of whom go on to teach. Lingua franca reported in its 1998/99 review of new full-time junior-level faculty appointments in four-year colleges and universities that in fourteen of twenty-one fields studied the University of Chicago placed more of its Ph.D. graduates in such positions than Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford or Yale. Twenty-one of the faculty specializing in South Asia teach in disciplinary departments which rank in the top six in the country. Approximately 260 courses with South Asia content are taught, 160 or so at any one time (Appendix B).
1.A.1) Variety of disciplines and country coverage. The disciplinary breadth of the Center can be observed by the number of departments and professional programs that have faculty with a significant teaching component covering South Asia (Appendix C), and that have awarded degrees with a South Asian language requirement (Table 1). The Center calls on thirty-eight faculty in eighteen departments and three professional programs. Students have graduated with B.A.s, M.A.s and Ph.D.s in twenty-three departments and six professional programs.
Table 1
Degrees Awarded with South Asian Concentration, Autumn 1996–Summer 1999[1]
Department / Ph.D. / M.A. / B.A.African American Studies / 1
Anthropology / 11 / 15 / 7
Art / 2 / 1
Behavioral Sciences / 1
Biological Sciences / 27
BusinessSchool * / 1 / N/A
Chemistry / 4
Comp. Studies in Literature / 1
History of Culture / 1 / 1
DivinitySchool * / 11 / 13 / N/A
Economics / 2 / 1 / 8
Education * / 2 / N/A
English Lang. and Lit. / 5
Geography / 1
History / 3 / 3 / 6
International Relations * / 3 / N/A
Jewish Studies / 1
Law * / 1 / N/A
Law, Letters and Society / 1
Linguistics / 5 / 1
Near Eastern Lang. and Lit. / 1 / 1
Philosophy / 1
Physical Sciences / 1
Physics / 1
Political Science / 6 / 4 / 15
Psychology / 1 / 2
Public Policy Studies * / 1 / 5
Social Sciences / 6 / 5
Social Thought / 1
Sociology / 3 / 2
South Asian Lang. and Civ. / 9 / 5 / 24
Total / 56 / 65 / 112
Country coverage in the area can be observed by the reach of courses and Ph.D. dissertations. Ralph Nicholas, Clinton Seely, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, who teach Bengali culture and Bengali, attend to both Bangladesh and West Bengal. The University is a founding member of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Institute of Sri Lankan Studies. C.M. Naim teaches the continent's Islamic culture, Urdu and Urdu literature. He advised the Berkeley Urdu Language Program in Pakistan. He and Lloyd Rudolph also represent Chicago in the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. The program has generated many Ph.D.s on Pakistan. Matthew Kapstein teaches courses on Tibet and Nepal; Susanne Hoeber Rudolph teaches Mughal history, common to both the Indian and Pakistani traditions. Fifty-six Ph.D. dissertations have been by students taking 500 South Asia course units. (Please consult < for a complete database of Chicago's Ph.D.s on South Asian topics awarded since 1914.) The broad array of issued addressed in dissertations during the past three years include: economics of consumption in rural Pakistan; the politics of gender, class, and culture in Calcutta jute mills; early cinema and its reception in south India; violence in urban Sri Lanka; the impact of political reform and economic liberalization on India’s federal system; and aesthetics, politics and poetics of visual representation in the liturgical practices of the Vallabha Sampradaya Hindu community at Kota.
1.A.2) Availability of South Asia courses in professional schools. Most prolific of the professional schools in offering joint Ph.D.s with the Center is the DivinitySchool. These graduates are much sought after in liberal arts college history of religions programs. The Center offers an M.A./M.B.A. in conjunction with the Graduate School of Business that calls for sixteen business and twelve South Asia courses, and a joint M.A. degree with the Committee on International Relations. The Center has also collaborated with the Education Department, the LawSchool, and the School of Public Policy in training students for M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. (See those marked with asterisks in Table 1.) Finally, it is important to note that students in the professional schools often enroll in South Asia courses as electives even though they are not seeking a formal joint degree.
1.B) Depth of specialized course coverage. The departments of Anthropology, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the DivinitySchool offer a broad selection of courses, each having more than five faculty members who specialize in South Asia. History and Political Science, with three South Asia faculty each, also provide a range of courses from introductory to advanced. History, like South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the DivinitySchool, offers courses on both ancient and modern South Asia.
1.C) Interdisciplinary courses. Chicago has a well-known tradition of interdisciplinary studies. Graduate students are actively encouraged to transgress departmental lines through extra-departmental courses. Undergraduates benefit from the three-quarter South Asian Civilizations course, the flagship of the South Asia program, which is currently team-taught by a Buddhologist, a Tamil literature scholar, and a political scientist. Its syllabus includes literature, religion, philosophy, history and contemporary issues. Additionally, it is common for faculty to teach across disciplinary lines, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty (history; social theory; literature); Martha Nussbaum (law; religion; gender studies); and Lloyd Rudolph (political economy; history).
1.D.1) Adequate non-language faculty? The Center has thirty-three non-language faculty, at three levels of commitment: 100% to program, six; 50% to program, ten; 25% to program, seventeen (Appendix C). For faculty strength as measured by outstanding publishing quality and quantity, see brief curricula vitae in Appendix C.
1.D.2) Pedagogy training for teaching assistants. The ChicagoCollege insists on training programs for T.A.s and has several formal programs: "The Little Red School House" for literary and writing skills; the Chicago Teaching Program, through Continuing Education, for general pedagogy; and the College's apprenticeship program for handling a discussion class. In addition, South Asia faculty Mithilesh Mishra, Norman Cutler and Clinton Seely have held pedagogic workshops specifically for language T.A.s to supplement the supervised apprenticeship which has been the usual mode in language classes. This fall the University established the Center for Teaching and Learning, which will serve as a pedagogical resource for junior faculty and advanced graduate students. One of the Center's new offerings is a certificate program for graduate students seeking more extensive pedagogic training. The Center is a joint initiative of the undergraduate College, the four graduate divisions, and the Office of the Provost.
2. Quality of the Applicant's Language Instructional Program
2.A.1) Extent of languages covered. The Center regularly offers six modern and two classical languages: Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Tibetan, Urdu, Persian and the classical Sanskrit and Pali. Students may also study North Indian variations – Maithili, Magahi, Sadari, Bhojpuri – as well asPunjabi (Table 3). Students interested in other languages are referred to summer programs and encouraged to take advantage of American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) offerings.
2.A.2) Language enrollment statistics. Table 3 depicts enrollments for our language courses during 1998/99. For a more detailed statement, please see Appendix B. Our students make active use of the summer language program option because of the opportunity it provides for uninterrupted study. The number of individuals taking advantage of the option is about ten annually (Table 2).
Table 2
Summer Language Study, 1999[2]
Student / Dept. / Lang. / LocationThomas Asher / Anthro. / Hindi / AIIS
Kristen Bloomer * / Divinity / Tamil / Pondicherry
Robert Moore * / Divinity / Tibetan / Virginia
Gabriel Robinson * / Divinity / Bengali / AIIS
Kristen Rudisill / Divinity / Hindi / AIIS
Blake Wentworth / Divinity / Tamil / AIIS
Ernst Kirchner * / Hum. Dev. / Tamil / Pondicherry
Genevieve Lakier / Soc. Sci. / Tibetan / Wisconsin
Whitney Cox * / SALC / Tamil / AIIS
Andrew Nicholson * / SALC / Hindi / Wisconsin
Melinda Pilling * / SALC / Hindi / Washington
2.B.1) Levels of instruction. Chakrabarty and Seely in Bengali and Trivedi in Hindi/Urdu offer advanced readings in those three languages, as does Naim in Urdu. Cutler handles all levels of Tamil with assistance from a supervised instructional assistant for the lower level courses. Kapstein offers advanced courses in Tibetan. Helmet Moayyad and John Perry offer Persian at all levels. Collins, Doniger, Kapstein, Pollock provide Sanskrit; Collins provides Pali for students of Buddhism. Please see Table 3 for a summary statement.
2.B.2) Courses taught in foreign languages. Other than advanced literature courses, only a few South Asia courses, such as Ronald Inden's Film in India, are currently taught in a South Asian language. However, the Center plans to link with the College’s "foreign-languages-across-the-curriculum" program during the coming three years to encourage more offerings.
2.C.1) Sufficiency of language faculty. Fifteen faculty and four teaching assistants provide the personnel to staff four language levels (Table 3 and Appendix C). At the retirement of three faculty members who taught Hindi in addition to other subjects, the program was able to hire Mithilesh Mishra, who is well versed in language pedagogy and especially in performance-based teaching and proficiency testing. Mishra acquired his experience with the intensive intermediate-level Hindi course offered in the summer at the University of Wisconsin and his responsibilities at Chicago are confined to language pedagogy. Mishra teaches first and second year classes together with an instructional assistant who also taught in the Wisconsin intensive summer program. Harish Trivedi, a visitor and experienced scholar of North Indian cultural traditions, has worked with more advanced students while the department searches for a permanent appointment in North Indian literatures and cultures.
Table 3
Languages Offered, 1998/99[3]
Regularly Offered / Levels / No. of FacultyBengali / 4 / 2
Hindi / 4 / 2 (+2)
Pali / 2 / 1
Persian / 4 / 3
Sanskrit / 4 / 3 (+1)
Tamil / 4 / 1 (+1)
Tibetan / 4 / 2
Urdu / 4 / 1
Total / 15 (+4)
Offered on Demand
Maithili
Punjabi
Magahi
Bhojpuri
Sadari
Enrollments
Bengali / 14 / Hindi / 125
Persian / 86 / Tamil / 33
Tibetan / 26 / Urdu / 33
Pali / 3 / Sanskrit / 92
2.C.2) Language pedagogy. Three of the Chicago modern language faculty have attended one of the ACTFL training workshops on performance-based teaching and proficiency testing: Cutler, Naim, and Seely. In addition, Professors Cutler and Seely qualified as proficiencytesters in English, as ACTFL is not equipped to certify proficiency testers in Bengali and Tamil. They have adapted both performance and proficiency methods to a context in which there are no national proficiency guidelines.
Hindi does have national guidelines. Mishra is on the committee set up by the South Asian Language Teachers' Association to improve performance teaching and proficiency testing. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he is preparing digitized materials for performance-oriented teaching.
2.D) Performance based instruction; teaching resources; proficiency requirements. Cutler and Seely are leading figures in the small community of Bengali and Tamil teachers in devising materials for instruction based on performance. These resources increase the emphasis on "active" rather than "passive" skills, and on functional language use. Cutler requires weekly conversation with a native speaker, eschews rote repetition of authored dialogues, emphasizes role-playing, uses slowed soundtracks of Tamil movies to demonstrate context specific dialogues, and exposes students to journalistic prose. Seely and a native speaker conduct weekly conversation sessions and use situation cards to stimulate dialogue. He has designed a series of interactive computer exercises for use in teaching. Mishra and his assistant conduct weekly informal conversation sessions to improve aural/oral performance and require their students to keep diaries in Hindi. The Tibetan instructor will be expected to be proficient in this approach.
As a member of the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (CLTL), Chicago continues to expand faculty resources and opportunities for language instruction. Several faculty are creating new resources for language teaching: Mishra is developing audio-visual digitized tapes under his Mellon grant; Kapstein is beginning to prepare a reader for advanced Tibetan (Timeline 11 and Budget Yrs. 1-2, E.1.b); Naim has recently revised the text and accompanying tapes of his Introductory Urdu; Cutler is collaborating with Schiffman at Pennsylvania to create a site on the World Wide Web for Tamil pedagogical materials with funding from CLTL; Nye is creating thirty-four electronic dictionaries under grant support from US/ED; and James Lindholm, a Tamil consultant, has provided user-friendly dialogues, slow echo re-dramatization, and drills based on two Tamil films for use in our Tamil program. Over the past decade, our faculty’s innovative projects have been awarded more than $43,000 in support from the CLTL. (Please see Appendix C for individual CVs with full bibliographic details.)
A state of the art LanguageFacultyResourceCenter supports classroom pedagogy, creation of language teaching resources, and computerized linguistics research on South Asian languages. The nine-room complex of computer, video and audio equipment was completed in the early 1990s and is now being augmented with support from the Mellon Foundation.
Mishra is using proficiency tests in first and second year Hindi in the context of national guidelines. In the absence of guidelines, Naim conducts entry and exit testing which approximates the proficiency categories. Seely evaluates students' Bengali capacity at the beginning and end of the academic year in a manner consistent with ACTFL oral proficiency standards.
3. Quality of Curriculum Design
3.A.1) Baccalaureate degree programs. Chicago undergraduates are introduced to South Asia through a course specifically designed for them, the three-quarter sequence on South Asian Civilizations. Each year about sixty students from the College enroll in this year-long sequence of courses. In addition, all graduate courses at the 300 level are routinely open to undergraduates. South Asia courses had a total of 928 undergraduate enrollments in 1998/99. In the same year 40 baccalaureate degrees were awarded with South Asia concentrations, as defined by US/ED.
The position of Associate Dean of International and Second Language Education was created by the College in 1999. The Associate Dean is responsible for the language competency examination system, the Foreign Language Proficiency Certificate program, implementation of foreign language acquisition courses and summer language training seminars and courses. In coordination with the Director of Foreign Study Programs, she oversees the study and internship abroad programs and supervises grant programs to support international research and foreign language acquisition.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded a major, five-year grant to the College for restructuring language teaching and learning. This ambitious new program has as its principal goals the internationalization of the curriculum, increasing opportunities for study abroad, and creating an emphasis on language competency rather than fulfillment of a minimal requirement. Meanwhile, the University is raising an endowment of $5,000,000 to sustain the programs and to support the awarding of 150 fellowships annually for study abroad.
While the emphasis under the Mellon grant is on the most frequently taught languages, the program also produces significant benefits for the less frequently taught languages. These benefits include: 1) appointment of the new and permanent Associate Dean of International and Second Language Education, 2) creation of a Language Instruction Coordinating Committee in the College, 3) upgrading equipment in existing language laboratories and creating a network of language learning spaces in dormitories, and 5) establishing incentives to fuse language teaching with teaching of content across the curriculum. The related SouthAsiaCenter initiative to create an International Satellite TV Center will further enhance language instruction in the less frequently taught languages (Timeline 3 and Budget Yrs. 1-3, E.1.e). The Center will also collaborate with the College to establish an intensive language study program in India during the next triennium and simultaneously offer students the opportunity to take the South Asian Civilizations course in India(Timeline 1 and Budget Yrs. 1-2, C.2).
3.A.2) Appropriateness of undergraduate options. South Asian studies undergraduate concentrations are available in the social sciences and the humanities. Each concentration requires three quarters of the South Asian Civilizations sequence, six quarters of a South Asian language for humanities and three for social sciences, six other approved courses for humanities and three for social sciences, and a B.A. thesis written under the supervision of a faculty advisor for social sciences students. Social sciences concentrators must in addition complete two approved South Asia elective courses. Students are encouraged to take more than the minimum language requirements and almost all of the undergraduates do. The certificate (comparable to a minor) in South Asian studies is another option in the College. It involves five courses but no language requirement. Science students often take this option in order to broaden their non-science education. About nine certificates in South Asian studies are conferred annually.