A growing interest in Asian languages, cultures and geopolitics - from the booming economies of China and India to troubled hot spots in North Korea and the Middle East - has prompted a University of Colorado at Boulder center to expand its course offerings to undergraduate and graduate students.
Professor Laurel Rasplica Rodd, director of the CU-Boulder Center for Asian Studies, said students began taking Hindi classes this academic year and that Farsi and Indonesian classes would be offered starting next fall.
Â鶹ÒùÔº have been able to take Arabic classes for several years, and they are in high demand, she added. In addition, the university continues to offer three years of Korean language classes as well as bachelor's and master's degree programs in Chinese and Japanese.
Rodd said the expansion of new language classes was part of a comprehensive plan to strengthen Asian studies overall on the CU-Boulder campus. Â鶹ÒùÔº petitioned to have Farsi classes added to the course list, she said.
"It's exciting to see so many students willing to take that leap" into learning other languages, Rodd said.
The Center for Asian Studies is a coordinating unit with affiliated faculty members from many departments who teach, conduct research and participate in community outreach programs involving any area of Asia. In recent years, the center has received federal grants to support new faculty positions, research grants and fellowships for graduate students and cultural events on campus.
The center is using two U.S. Department of Education grants to hire new faculty and ramp up course offerings in several departments focusing on southeast, south and west Asia, the latter more commonly referred to as the Middle East.
New courses in Asian studies will touch on issues in the politics of Islam, social movements in the Asian public sphere, global responsibility to environmental changes and Asian arts in popular culture. New faculty members are teaching in the history, geography, political science and art and art history departments.
"Given the increasingly borderless world we live in and the increasing importance of Asia, we have really felt for many years that the university needed to strengthen course offerings and research in these areas," Rodd said.
The grants have enabled the center to hire an additional outreach coordinator to work with K-12 teachers trying to teach their students about Asia, to create fellowships for graduate students who have a need to study an Asian language as part of their research focus and to increase the availability of library books and other resources about Asia.
For more information about the CU-Boulder Center for Asian Studies, visit .