South Asian Studies programs at Emory

Asian Studies, Middle East and South Asian Studies and West and South Asian Studies

Departmental and program websites.

Major subject areas being researched and taught by Emory faculty

Custom searches of the EUCLID catalog for recent acquisitions in the major subject areas. Contact me to request new acquisitions in any medium.

Course Guides in South Asian Studies at Emory

Religious Transformation in Colonial India (2001)
Seminar on the Puranas (2002)

From Gandhi to Google (2007)
Psychoanalysis and the Religious Cultures of South Asia (2007)

Directory of Resources
(See also review below of Research and Writing Tools, esp. Search Engines)

Anthropology and ethnography

Human Relations Area Files is an online database of ethnographic material and other texts indexed by culture and subject. It is useful to scholars focusing on comparative research, for example, anthropology of religion.

Archives

Guide to collections of original and reproduced, published and unpublished primary sources.

Atlanta Area Associations and Events

See also Khabar .

Bibliographies

How to find comprehensive and specialized monographic and serial bibliographies at Emory and on the internet. Try Endnote (Emory supported) or Zotero (web interface) to gather and store digital materials.

Biographical Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

See also international biographical reference works like these online databases.

Conferences and Proceedings

This general guide works for South Asian materials too.

Current Awareness or Alert Services

Obtain email or rss notices about new books, journal tables of contents, database updates, and more. Sources relevant to South Asian Studies that have alert services include the journal Modern Asian Studies, Asia Society, Asian Studies WWW Monitor, Journal of the AAR, InformaWorld, IngentaConnect, indology blogs, and most of the major distributors of books published in South Asia. Google Alerts will email updates to your own Google searches. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and citeulike will send updates via rss for tags you select. Finally, join one of the field's major listservs.

Databases (online indexes of citations or full-text articles)

See the guide to Journal Articles for general tips. Among databases licensed by Emory, try first the Bibliography of Asian Studies, Most other comprehensive online databases like Academic Search Premier in the Database Locator will generate useful results. For a quick "federated" search of multiple databases at once, try GALILEO's QuickSearch. Beyond Emory, search the South Asia Research Documentation Services database (about 70,000 citations from 1797-2006). For reviews, see the note below.

Dissertations and theses (a custom search of EUCLID for those produced at Emory on India)

Also consult Emory's Electronic Theses and Dissertations site to search electronic versions of Emory theses and dissertations. For theses produced in North America and parts of Europe, use Dissertation Abstracts. For India, use Vidyanidhi.

Directory of scholars in the field

Also try a Google search of faculty in South Asian studies at .edu sites or the American Academy of Religion or Association of Asian Studies membership directories (available only to members)

Hartford Seminar Collection at Pitts Theology Library

250,000 volumes supported the Seminary's program of training missionaries for work overseas, including South Asia. Many are not cataloged online; check the card catalog at the Theology Library.

Images

See also the American Council for Southern Asian Art for bibliographies, a color slide project, a microfiche archive and other outreach materials. Recently, the ACSAA collection was acquired by ArtStor.

Indian Americans

Try this EUCLID search for a list of literary works, ethnographies, videos, government docs, histories, bibliographies, sociological studies, psychological studies, and more.

Journals and Newspapers

Current, lapsed, and ceased journals published in or about South Asia and available at Emory or through our online licenses. For newspapers online, see our indexes and full-text databases, esp. Ethnic NewsWatch for those published for and by South Asians in the US. For Atlanta, see Khabar. Also see International Union List of South Asian Newspapers and Gazettes. For online newspapers, see the Internet Public Library list.

Languages and literature

Apart from South Asian authors writing in English, we systematically acquire items in the following South Asian languages.
Sanskrit : (including the Daniel H.H. Ingalls Sanskrit Library) See also the Language Center's Sanskrit page and Google "sanskrit text TEI" for sanskrit texts encoded following the Text Encoding Initiative standards.
Tibetan : See also the Emory Tibet Digital Library and the Language Center's Tibetan page
Hindi : See also the Language Center's Hindi page
We acquire items in Bengali and other languages on an ad hoc basis. To find citations to individual works, try the online indexes; for full texts online, try Literature Online (English only) and Online Books.

Library Instruction

Take our online tutorial or contact me for individual or class instruction in how to find resources at Emory and beyond.

Listservs

Major listservs for scholars in the field are RISA-L, Indology, and H-Asia. They often will respond to requests for help on research topics.

Maps

Digital and print materials. The library's Data Center now supports GIS software if you want to manipulate digital map data.

Movies

Books on the subject as well as videocassettes, dvd's, and vcd's.

Music

Books and recordings.

Reference Works on South Asia

Good starting point for basic research. Historical, geographical, and cultural dictionaries, encyclop(a)edias, or gazetteers. See also works of broader scope online as well as works of narrower scope on geographical area (e.g., Bangladesh) or subject matter (e.g., women in South Asia). Also see review articles.

Resource Guides at Other University Libraries

Google search results. See also Columbia University's list of major collections around the world or Google this search phrase: ("south asia" OR "south asian") collection

Reviews

To find articles that review a book or literature in general on a subject, try Google or Google Scholar (put the title in quotes and add the word review). Also try the Book Review category in Databases@Emory to search licensed databases. Finally, try comprehensive journal databases.

Statistics

Print and online materials with comprehensive or specialized data on India or South Asia. Also check the general online statistical databases.

Tibet

Emory Tibet Digital Library is a developing site with thousands of Tibetan language classic texts. See also Emory's Dalai Lama site and Emory Tibet Partnership site.

Vendors

Publishers and distributors of publications from South Asia.

Research and Writing Tools

Most common tools apply to South Asian Studies. See Emory's Writing Center handouts for basic guidance. For bibliographic management (organization and generation of references), Emory supports Endnote. Search engines are central to research across disciplines, but a few comments relevant to research in South Asian Studies might be useful.

Search Engines

Searching at this stage of the digital evolution is still not a seamless or integrated process. Not everything is digitized. Whatever is digitized is not necessarily in a standard format. Keyword searches without knowing the appropriate scholarly vocabulary or context can be misleading. Rresearchers need to be agile -- ready, for example, to step back and find the standard vocabulary for a topic (e.g., from reference works), to move sideways from one search engine to another (e.g., with LibX), to follow LC subject heading links or citation links or "related record" links, to change formats (e.g., look for reviews as well as articles and monographs), to cross disciplinary boundaries (e.g., search psychology, economics, social science, business and science databases), and even to go offline to look at works available only in print (e.g., bibliographies). Here are some tips.

• Install the Firefox plug-in LibX to search EUCLID (or WorldCat or Google or Google Scholar) on the title, author, isbn or keyword in any web page and to link directly from citations in Google from Emory-licensed databases to the full record. Useful to find books and articles on the fly, as well as tables of contents, synopses and reviews.
• Google
  • To restrict searches to educational sites, add site:.edu to your search phrase
  • Embedded below is a Google Custom Search Engine that searches only selected websites relevant to South Asian studies. Site suggestions welcome. Includes the following categories.
    • College and University sites
    • Book and/or Video vendor sites: good for contents and synopses of recent publications
    • Governmental and non-governmental organization sites

• Check Google Book for digitized books from major publishes and universities.
• Check Google Scholar for scholarly articles.
• Go where Google cannot follow
  • Search EUCLID to find unique materials or cataloging notes not found on Google. Here are tips for searching for South Asian materials.
  • Search Databases@Emory for licensed materials not indexed on Google; esp. the Bibliography of Asian Studies for citations from South Asia-focused publications and comprehensive databases like Academic Search Premier or GALILEO's QuickSearch for a more panoramic exploration.
  • Search OAIster to access digitized archives in a format not searchable by Google
  • Search South Asian Studies listserv archives. You may have to join RISA-L, Indology, and H-Asia to search their archives.
  • Look also at the list of Asian Studies search engines compiled by T. Matthew Ciolek.
  • Many South Asia items from the Hartford collection can only be found in the card catalog at Pitts.
• Reference Finder: If you are writing a paper or have an article for which you want to find addditional resources, try this tool. You paste up to 8 pages of text into the box and it instantly pulls out a list of keywords which you can edit and then automatically have inserted into any of the major search engines to find related stuff.
• Online directories which offer organized categories of resources may sometimes be more efficient than using search engines. This guide itself includes a directory and like all directories has its peculiarities and limitations. Try also these major directories cataloged in EUCLID, as well as Intute and Academic Info.