The Global & International Studies Program was established in 1999 and was one of the first interdisciplinary departments of its kind. Today, the Program has a highly successful Masters Program in Global Studies, a PhD emphasis in Global Studies, and anticipates implementing a PhD in Global Studies in 2014-2015.

What is Global Studies? Global Studies is an emergent field concerned with understanding the historical and contemporary phenomenon of globalization in all its aspects. Although global phenomena have been studies for many decades, global studies as a field developed largely after the turn of the 21st century and has expanded exponentially since the first programs were founded in Asian, European, and American universities in the 1990s. Moving away from conventional state-based notions of international order, the field of global studies seeks to promote critical reflection on how the world works as an interlinked, interactive set of processes and relationships that operate across broad spheres of experience, from the social to the political, the economic to the cultural, the religious to the environmental, the legal to the technological, the scientific to the subjective.

Faculty in Global Studies. Faculty related to the Global Studies program are engaged in a wide range of interdisciplinary research agendas which utilize approaches from the humanities and social sciences to provide perspectives that are historical, critical, and engaged. These faculty teach and conduct research in the department’s three thematic concentrations: (i) global culture, ideology, and religion; (ii) global political economy, development, and environment; and (iii) global governance, civil society, and human rights.