Greetings from our new Director, Tabea Alexa Linhard
Welcome to Global Studies at Washington University!
I am delighted to lead this vibrant intellectual community and look forward to a transformative year. Please join me in welcoming Chelsea Viteri, our new Program Coordinator to Global Studies.
We have a busy, but promising year ahead of us. Building on our strength as an interdisciplinary program that has trained students for over forty years, Global Studies is ideally situated to become a hub where faculty and students find support to carry out global projects that do not fit within traditional disciplines. For that purpose, we have created the Global Futures initiative, covering both the needs of students interested in an innovative liberal arts education and of faculty committed to collaborative teaching, scholarship, and public-facing endeavors. Complex problems, including forced migration and human trafficking, climate change, or the rise of populism, require cross-disciplinary approaches and transnational perspectives. Global Studies hopes to be the place in Arts & Sciences where members of our community find innovative and creative approaches to such problems.
The Global Futures initiative includes four workshops with renowned leaders in the field. Our first guest this fall will be Kimberly Kay Hoang, the director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago and author of the forthcoming Spiderweb Capitalism. How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton UP, 2022). Professor Hoang will give a public lecture on October 13 and lead our first Global Futures Workshops on October 14. During this academic year, we will also offer small grants to faculty and PhD students to support endeavors related to the Global Futures Projects. More information about our Global Futures workshop and about the application process will soon be available on our webpage.
As has been a tradition in Global Studies, we will also host other guests who will address both the academic work we do in our courses and speak to our students’ future career options. Michael Curtis, Deputy Head of the Delegation of the European Union to the US will visit us on October 20. Shawn McHale (George Washington University), author of The First Vietnam War, will deliver a talk on September 30, and Amy Ronner (St. Thomas University - School of Law), a legal scholar who has published on Dostoevsky and the law and therapeutic jurisprudence will join us on October 25-26.
We are thankful to the Dean of Arts & Sciences, the Department of History, the Department of Sociology, and the American Culture Studies Program for their help supporting these events. In collaboration with the Department of Political Science, this year we are also inaugurating a new International Relations Colloquium that will bring to campus prominent scholars whose work has direct policy implications.
Next Spring, we will offer the first version of a new core Global Futures course for all GS majors. The course will provide our students with a solid foundation in the concepts behind Global Studies, a shared language, and an understanding of the main events and transformations that led to our current interconnected world.
In the two decades I have been at Washington University, I have witnessed the growth of a university that is committed to a global vision even as it remains firmly rooted in St. Louis, the expansion of a Global Studies program devoted to undergraduate excellence in an interconnected world, and even the transformation of my own career path. While I joined Wash U’s faculty as a scholar interested in Spanish and Mexican literature and film, offering courses, and carrying out research on global migration has become a cornerstone of what I do. I look forward to learning from and working with you!
