Rodney F. Moag Malayalam Studies Excellence Fund

In the spring of 2022, the Department of Asian Studies organized a crowdfunding campaign for Malayalam studies through the 40for40 program at the University of Texas at Austin. For more than forty years, support from the UT-Austin and from the US Department of Education has made it possible for our department to teach Malayalam. UT-Austin is one of the few US universities to offer courses in Malayalam. Through the generosity of more than 200 friends and supporters, we raised more than $34,000 in order to ensure that Malayalam always has a home at UT-Austin. At the end of the campaign, we decided to name the endowment for the first professor of Malayalam and the person who started the program in the 1980s, Prof. Rodney F. Moag. 

This endowed excellence fund will complement continuing financial support from the University and the federal government, but will also enable us to expand and enrich Malayalam language teaching at all levels. As always, we are committed to promoting cultural awareness of Kerala culture and history, to fostering institutional and educational exchange, and to advancing research of all kinds related to Kerala. In all these efforts, we view our work as part of a national effort, a project that will benefit not just UT-Austin students, but also programs and students across Texas, as well in New Jersey and California and beyond.

Recently, for example, we created exams through UT High School to enable Malayalam-speaking children in the state of Texas to receive high school language credits by exam. We also continue to add resources to our collection of free, online learning materials and teaching resources for Malayalam at this website. These materials are already being used in our courses and in community language programs for children. Finally, we of course continue to offer academic year and summer language courses for college and university students, and even high-school juniors and seniors for transferable college credit.

We are grateful to the many donors whose gifts small and large together created this permanent source of support for the study of Malayalam and Kerala in the US.

*If your name is missing from this donor list, please let us know and we’ll make sure to add it right away.