The University of Pennsylvania’s commitment to South Asia Studies began a hundred years ago, when in 1912 Franklin Edgerton was appointed Penn’s first professor of Sanskrit. Penn’s exceptional South Asia library collection dates back nearly two hundred years. In 1947, that W. Norman Brown, Penn’s distinguished Sanskrit scholar, established the nation’s first South Asia Studies Department (SAST). It is still one of the few departments dedicated exclusively to the study of South Asia. Today, four administrative units support South Asia Studies at Penn: the South Asia Center (SAC), the Department of South Asia Studies (SAST), the Graduate Group in South Asia Regional Studies (SARS) and the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI).
Resources:
Additional resources available in our General Resources section.
To request SAC support for an event and for other inquiries, write to the Center at SouthAsiaCenter@upenn.edu