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COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES

GLOBAL LEARNING

Students from the social justice documentary program.
Students from the social justice documentary program.

With a rich, interdisciplinary curriculum and expert, international faculty, the College prepares students—both in the classroom and through study abroad—to become global citizens.

Today’s increasingly global society requires citizens who can analyze intersectional identities, overlapping diasporas and the historical structures at play. 

  • The College offers majors and minors that equip students for international careers that contribute to the common good. Our Global Interdisciplinary Studies program offers seven area studies specializations, a Peace and Justice major and a Gender and Women's Studies major.
  • Courses across every discipline—from history and literature, to social justice and social movements, to global ecology and ecosystems—explore international impacts.
  • In addition to our unique Vatican Internship program, through the Communication department or the Computing Sciences department, we work with students to find and secure internships all over the world.
  • Our faculty hail from nations all over the world including Argentina, Ghana, Israel, Japan, Spain and more.

Study Abroad

The College offers several study abroad programs designed to prepare students for an ever-changing global workplace and allow them to connect with their disciplines and majors in exciting new ways. Through our partnerships with some of the world’s most respected universities, students will be able to earn college credit toward several majors and minors, and in some cases certificates in specific areas of study.

Some of these programs are not open this year due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.

Semester programs

Summer programs

Learn more about study abroad opportunities through the Office of Education Aboard.

EXPLORE STUDY ABROAD BY MAJOR

  

Embedded Travel

The College is committed to providing our students with exceptional international learning opportunities—going beyond the traditional semester study-abroad model. The College offers rich, relevant and participatory courses with embedded travel components. Recent and ongoing experiences include:

Traveling abroad enables student-filmmakers in the Social Documentary course with Hezekiah Lewis, MFA, to do authentic storytelling that draws attention to important issues and drives social change. A trip to Ghana inspired Sankofa, a documentary about mental slavery and its negative systemic impact on black males across the globe, which won the gold medal in the Documentary/Domestic Film Schools Category in the 2019 Student Academy Awards.

Learn more about the program.

This course, led by Robert Curry, PhD, provides an introduction to environmental biology through study of the natural history of organisms and ecosystems of Maritime Canada. Lectures, readings and writing assignments are augmented by a multi-day trip to Nova Scotia with a focus on the exploration of diverse terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, identification of organisms and independent projects.

Writing Through Conflict explores the important role of creative writing in confronting, protesting and engaging with socio-political conflicts. As part of this course, students traveled to Belfast, Ireland to participate in an intensive creative writing conference at Queen's University, engaged in daily writing workshops with Irish authors, took literary tours in Belfast, attended readings and creative writing symposiums, and revised and shared their work in a student showcase.

  

International Student Experience

The College cultivates an environment that welcomes and learns from international faculty and students. CLAS attracts undergraduate and graduate students from 50 countries around the world, and our international student and faculty population grows each year. International students will find a supportive and rich environment at Villanova.

  

STORIES OF DISCOVERY

TELLING GLOBAL STORIES

Villanova University’s Social Justice Documentary filmmaking course is known for producing documentaries that shed light on important narratives; many of the films receive local and national recognition. In the 2023 – 2024 academic year, students in the international section of the course traveled to Brazil and produced two films, “The Art of Resistance," about preserving heritage, and “Peaking Through the Sand," about a bond between mother and son and overcoming hardships.

CROSS-CULTURAL DISCOURSE

Grace Kully ’23 CLAS participated in the Creative Writing Program’s embedded travel course, Writing Through Conflict. “In Writing Through Conflict, I grew as a writer, a person and a global citizen,” says Kully. “We weren’t only learning about The Troubles, but reading the creative works that were born from conflict, and then welcomed into that creative community in Belfast.” Kully’s experience in inspired her to pursue a master's degree in creative writing at Queen’s University through the Seamus Heaney Centre’s Villanova Scholarship Program.

ALUMNUS AROUND THE GLOBE

As an Associate Expert and Junior Professional Officer at the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism, Brendan Carchidi ’17 CLAS has a job that takes him around the globe where no two days are the same. “Each day seems to come with new faces, new contexts, new questions and most importantly new opportunities to learn about shared solutions that benefit all of humanity,” he explains. Carchidi's position makes him an international public servant, working to promote the integration of human rights into counter-terrorism policy initiatives and programming.