Center Profiles & Contacts
Carolina Asia Center
The Carolina Asia Center was established in 2002 as a center in the Curriculum in International Studies and in the ensuing two and a half years has become a separate unit of the College of Arts & Sciences, and is a core element of UNC-Chapel Hill’s initiative to strengthen its position as a world-class international university.
The Carolina Asia Center currently covers a world area west to east from Iran to Japan and north to south from Mongolia to Indonesia.
CAC is the hub for three sets of inter-related activities focusing on Asia: Cutting-edge Research; Innovative Teaching; and Community Partnerships. CAC responds to the following imperatives:
- The need to rethink traditional area studies programs.
- The emergence of trans-border and global studies.
- The need to reconfigure relations among area studies specialists, comparativists, and globalists in the scholarly community.
- The opportunity to create new synergies in study abroad programs through undergraduate research and innovative teaching.
CAC initiates and promotes inter-disciplinary research of Asian history, languages, societies, and cultures by Carolina faculty, graduate and undergraduate students in such areas as Asian modernities, the environment, urban studies, regionalization and nationalism, history and memory, media, arts and culture, gender and work, intercultural communication, economic development, and human rights discourses.
CAC supports and develops innovative university teaching. The CAC also links UNC-Chapel Hill to educational partners including K-12 schools, community colleges, and other colleges and universities. CAC interfaces with research centers, government departments and NGOs, foundations, private industry, and foreign representatives.
On the UNC-Chapel Hill campus the Carolina Asia Center provides administrative support for the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations and The Alston Gardner Asia Initiative, supports The Mahatma Gandhi Fellowships program, and will link with the School of Public Health’s Framework Project on Global Health.
The Carolina Asia Center and associated faculty co-operate with the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute (APSI) at Duke University, which “is the focal point of research and teaching on the Asian/Pacific region at Duke University,” and the Triangle East Asia Colloquium founded in 1972.
UNC-CH, through the CAC, works closely with NC State, and Duke as a member of the North Carolina Center for South Asian Studies of the Triangle South Asia Consortium, a Title VI National Resource Center which “seeks to promote the scholarly study and research of cultures and languages of the South Asian subcontinent which includes the current nation-states of (alphabetically) Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the historically linked contiguous regions that today constitute the states of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq to the west, Tibet (now a part of China) to the north, and the relevant portions of Southeast Asia." The NCCSAS funds the following languages: Bengali, Hindi, Persian, Tamil, and Urdu, and provides funding for library acquisitions and visiting speakers.
Most of the funding for the administrative costs of the Center comes from a Freeman Foundation grant for East and Southeast Asia. CAC also receives funding for the Foreign Language and Area Studies program from the South Asia Title VI grant administered at Duke University. The Carolina Asia Center also receives a small budget for supplies and telephones, as well as membership and matching funds for The Triangle South Asia Consortium (TSAC) and The Triangle East Asia Consortium (TEAC) from the College of Arts & Sciences.