Faculty-Led Programs

This seminar in Barcelona is designed to expose students to a completely different environment of Spain, developing "unique human skills" to thrive in global environments that are becoming more and more the norm than the exception. The way students will achieve those goals is through real-time impactful consultancy projects with creative, intensive, challenge-based learning in contemporary coworker spaces.

What makes Paris, Paris? To answer this question, students embark on a thirty-day historical and cultural journey from past to present, all the while living and studying in the heart of the City of Light. With afternoon field trips to the city’s world-renowned sites, monuments, museums, gardens, markets and neighborhoods, students experience and investigate the multicultural makeup of Paris, redefining the
traditional idea of la culture française. From its food to its architecture, to its population and its places of worship, the capital offers a unique perspective on France’s embrace of diversity, its strengths, weaknesses and shortfalls. Students will thus explore for instance the sought-after café culture and savor crepes and gazelle horns, discover Notre-Dame and the Grand Mosque of Paris, and visit Le Louvre and the Institute of the Arab World. Students will sharpen their critical thinking and cross-cultural competencies through blogging, vlogging, journaling and group discussions. In addition to practicing their French in their new day-to-day lives as Parisians, students take morning classes at the Institut Catholique de Paris Institute to further develop their language skills with fellow international francophones.

This course explores discourses surrounding race and ethnicity in Latin America from the colonial period to modern day. Students will unpack ideologies that center national identity and language as a means to obscure deeply embedded racial hierarchies. The course will analyze how a variety of countries have developed and deployed their own unique set of social tools to shape how race intersects with ethnicity, indigeneity, hybridity, and purity at different historical junctures. Particular attention will be paid to the tension between celebrating mixed racial heritage—an important political project at specific historical moments—and Eurocentric values that favor whiteness and “purity.”

This course has a two-week travel component to Puerto Rico, where students embark in a comparative analysis of the topics studied in the semester with an on-site experiential learning. This course fulfills the Global perspectives IDEAS requirement and is taught in Spanish.