Global Studies

Global Studies is an interdisciplinary program featuring courses that converge around 21st century problems and their implications for a sustainable future. Effective Fall 2027: Students can choose from three concentrations in International Relations, Global Sustainability, and Culture and Global Futures.

The International Relations concentration prepares students for careers in global governance and policy, international business, and humanitarian organizations. Students learn about politics, economics, and law, including relations between political parties, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Building on the fields of political science, law and justice, and economics, students choose from a range of courses that address global economics and development, human rights and ethics, international law, and policy and planning.  

The Global Sustainability concentration features courses that converge around 21st century problems and their implications for a sustainable future. Students are introduced to contemporary global topics such as food, water, transportation, and energy as part of the program’s core courses, examining their impact on the environment. Complementing this core curricular content are courses drawn from related majors including Environmental Studies, Political Science, and Sociology. Students learn to tackle global issues that transcend geographical borders, problem-solve, and prepare to become future thought leaders.  

The Culture and Global Futures concentration explores the interconnectedness of the world and its diverse cultural manifestations. Students examine how global forces impact culture, politics, economics, and society at local, regional, and global scales. This concentration builds on the fields of anthropology, global communication, and media studies, and prepares students for work at institutions and businesses/industries in the realms of arts and culture, museums and cultural heritage, tourism and travel, and communications and media.  

Courses are team-taught by two or more faculty from across the social and natural sciences, humanities and the arts, with a focus on integrating local and global knowledge and skills. Using sustainability as one of the broad organizing principles around which curricular content is structured, students learn to identify intersections between local life and global forces, and to understand how contemporary problems are mediated by particular geographic, demographic and sociopolitical forces across local-global scales.

Students gain broad knowledge of key competencies required to succeed in a global world and workforce – with emphasis on how to manage complexity, diversity and change, and how to apply acquired knowledge in real-world settings. Core competencies that students develop include: interdisciplinary critical analysis, evidence-based reasoning (qualitative and quantitative), the ability to link local-global theory and practice, collaboration across differences, and ethical reasoning and action.