The Carolina Asia Center is pleased to announce that it was awarded Title VI funding from the Department of Education for the next four years. After submitting a competitive application this past summer, the CAC learned of the good news just last week. Over $500,000 from 2018-2019 will support the Carolina Asia Center as a National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships.
As a Title VI designated national resource center from 2014-2018, the CAC invested in building Asian programming and conferences, expanding outreach to K-12 and community educators, increasing library acquisitions, establishing a UNC System Asia Scholar Network of Asian studies faculty from other UNC institutions, and providing support to faculty for research projects or professional development. As a FLAS-granting center, the CAC also supported numerous undergraduate and graduate students who are studying Chinese, Japanese, Hindi-Urdu, Korean, and Tagalog.
From 2018-2022, the CAC will continue to provide support to these programs and events, administer FLAS fellowships, and host new speaker series and conferences, including a Global Korea Conference in the spring of 2019.
In recent years the CAC has also launched the Modern Indian Studies Initiative, which aims to build a top scholarly program focusing on the India of today through collaboration with the local community. In addition, we partnered with the Southern Oral History Program to launch Southern Mix, which focuses on collecting oral histories from Asian and Asian American residents of the South. We continue to collaborate with Duke University and North Carolina State University on the Triangle East Asia Consortium and the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies. The CAC also houses the Phillips Ambassadors Program, the flagship scholarship program for studying abroad in Asia.
“Asian Studies has grown tremendously at UNC-Chapel Hill over the past ten years, and this Department of Education funding will enable us to continue to support our students and faculty as they study Asian languages, develop expertise on Asia in various fields, and immerse themselves in opportunities ranging from internships to collaborative research on the ground in Asia,” said CAC Director Morgan Pitelka, who led the center’s first successful Title VI application in 2014 and again co-authored the 2018 application with CAC Associate Director Mary Lagdameo.
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