Thanks to a prestigious federal grant, UC Davis this fall will greatly expand education about the Middle East and South Asia, including first-time instruction in Hindi/Urdu and Arabic, and new courses and K-12 outreach on the culture, history and religions of these geo-political hot spots.

Nearly $180,000 from the U.S. Department of Education will be bolstered by $470,000, an almost 3-to-1 match, from the UC Davis campus, according to Suad Joseph, a professor of anthropology and women and gender studies and director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program.

The new investment will boost the stature of the 2-year-old Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, one of only a half dozen such university programs in the nation that focus on studying both regions through an integrated curriculum.

"UC Davis is committed to internationalization, and this grant is an important step on the way," said Steven M. Sheffrin, dean of the Division of Social Sciences. "Although we have been planning our efforts for some time, after Sept. 11 it has become abundantly clear that we need to increase our knowledge in these key parts of the globe."

Plans for the new program include:

• An annual conference, workshops, seminars, a lecture series and K-12 teacher training workshops, faculty travel to the two regions to collect teaching materials and other activities, paid for by the federal grant and campus dollars.
• Two Fulbright grants to supplement the language instruction by bringing graduate students from the Middle East and South Asia to work as paid teaching assistants for next year.
• Funding to create 21 new courses about Middle East and South Asian culture and language, and the revising of 15 existing courses to strengthen education about the region, also paid for by the federal grant and campus dollars.

By the end of next academic year, UC Davis will offer 70 courses in its social science and humanities programs related to Middle East and South Asia studies. The campus now has 24 faculty members teaching regular courses in the area.

The Middle East/South Asia Studies Program reflects a UC Davis decision in the fall of 2005 to set as a top priority hiring new faculty and investing additional resources in the broad areas of globalization and internationalization and, specifically, in Islam, culture and society.

Typically, South Asia is a regional term for India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, though Afghanistan sometimes is included. The definition of the Middle East is more amorphous: For some it stretches from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and north into Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. For others, it is strictly the eastern Mediterranean Arab countries. The UC Davis program covers 35 countries.

"The very act of defining the two regions can be political, given the diversity of religions, ethnic origins and languages, not to mention their histories as overlapping empires and colonies." said Joseph, who pointed out that the UC Davis program will take an historical approach.

The evolution of the program dates to 2001, when UC Davis students and faculty began working on the framework for an undergraduate minor that eventually was approved in fall 2004. Joseph expects to have a major in the program by fall 2007, helped in large part by the recent federal grant. She said the grant was procured thanks to a coalition of students, faculty and staff who gathered volumes of material to write the complex application last year.

Indeed, UC Davis was one of only four universities in California and 22 in the nation to receive the grant this year, according to Christine Corey, a senior program officer for the U.S. Department of Education. The federal agency's Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Languages Program made the grant.

"It's a real coup for the university and the community," said Keith Watenpaugh, a new UC Davis faculty member in religious studies with a specialty in modern Middle Eastern history.

The grant dollars will provide seed money for two years to pay for instructors to create first- and second-year language courses. The campus is committed to continue the language courses beyond that, Sheffrin said.

By adding Hindi/Urdu and Arabic, UC Davis will be expanding to 12 the number of languages it teaches. UC Davis students say there is a large demand: In spring 2005, students collected nearly 900 signatures on a petition requesting that the campus offer both Hindi/Urdu and Arabic as regular language classes within the UC Davis quarter system.

The grant will allow UC Davis to teach 25 students a year in the languages. Because of the demand for Arabic language instruction, in particular, UC Davis students also enroll in classes at Sacramento City College, which is starting a beginning Arabic course in the fall.

Similar to its strategy in offering Farsi, the community college plans to offer only first- and second-semester classes in beginning Arabic for the first few years, according to Chris Iwata, dean of humanities and fine arts at Sacramento City College, to see if there is a steady demand for Arabic.