Humanities and Social Sciences

School of Social Sciences

La Trobe Institute of India and South Asia and India Focus Group

Arundhati Roy speaking at La Trobe University, 1999

The La Trobe India and South Asia Institute (LIISA) was officially established in 2005, and was launched by the Indian Ambassador to Australia. The Institute was established to provide a focus for the University's longstanding and lively intellectual engagement with South Asia, and its ongoing and growing links with academic institutions in that region. It is responsible for organising conferences and colloquia, guest lectures, intellectual exchanges, and for coordinating some of the University's institutional contacts with universities and research centres in India and elsewhere.

The University decided at its birth in 1967 to have a focus on India. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited La Trobe University during her Australian tour in 1968. Borchardt Library has one of the best South Asia collections in Australia, facilitating research on the region by the 15 or so scholars in three Faculties who teach and write about India, and a number of PhD students who work on India. Hindi and Sanskrit have been taught at La Trobe for 15 years, and the Open Learning Australia program in Hindi makes the language available worldwide, and complements the face-to-face Hindi program on campus at Bundoora.

La Trobe also has long-established and growing links with Indian universities, including a student exchange program, now in its tenth year, with Lady Shri Ram College of Delhi University. La Trobe has increasingly proved its attractiveness to students from South Asia. For instance, the Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering at La Trobe University each year enrols around 200 students from India to do Master by Coursework degrees.

La Trobe's leading position research on South Asia is reflected in the fact that it was designated the 'South Asia node' of the Asia-Pacific Futures Research Network (APFRN), funded by the Australian Research Council; this means that La Trobe has responsibility for mobilizing scholarship on South Asia around Australia and networking with other researchers of Asia. LIISA, in turn, is the hub of La Trobe's engagement with matters to do with South Asia.

Along with LIISA La Trobe University also has the India Focus Group (IFG), which was established in 1999 and draws together La Trobe University's varied on-campus connections with India and co-ordinates various aspects of the linkages with India at La Trobe.