Undergraduate Fields of Specialization: Global Interaction and Exchange

This field of specialization challenges students to explore how the world has become connected and disconnected at various times, from the ancient world to the present. Throughout history, the world has become smaller in countless ways: through human migration across land and sea, technological innovations from the steamship and telegraph to the airplane and internet, and the exchanges of ideas and cultures. Disease and war have also become global. Yet none of these flows and movements are smooth, even, or predictable. National borders and other social, political, and cultural barriers continue to matter. Faculty with a wide range of chronological, geographic, and thematic expertise offer courses that pay attention to large-scale processes like global wars and environmental change as well individual stories and experiences of “regular people” like peasants and priests in colonial Latin America to refugees escaping genocide in modern-day Africa.