Call for Applications: Global Across the Curriculum, Spring 2024

The Global Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh is pleased to announce the sixth iteration of Global Across the Curriculum (GXC), an interdisciplinary seminar intended to help faculty incorporate global perspectives into their undergraduate and graduate courses.

What do we mean by the global? Global Studies is often about a methodology rather than a particular topic. It is an approach that emphasizes connective thinking – that is, thinking about the transnational, trans-historical processes that shape our world in an interdisciplinary way. Global Studies troubles a traditional view of nation-states as the building blocks of the contemporary world. It seeks to highlight important connections between events and processes even when they appear to be disconnected, separated by time, space, or even our own categories of thought. In this seminar we discuss some important tools and approaches to connective thinking and learn to build it into our courses.

Each participant will have the opportunity to design a new course with a global orientation or incorporate a global perspective or dimension into an existing course. Many very different kinds of courses can be Global Studies courses: any course that encourages (or could encourage) students to make connections across and beyond national boundaries; that considers how historical contexts shape and are shaped by contemporary interpretations; or, that demonstrates an awareness that fields as diverse as Environmental Studies, Gender Studies, Economics, and Theatre are always-already in conversation with one another. If these new or revised courses are taught on Pitt’s main campus, we hope they will serve as suitable options for students pursuing the popular undergraduate Global Studies and Global Health Certificates; they should also fulfill the newly revised global component (section F) of the General Education Requirements.

The seminar provides a great opportunity to meet and work with colleagues from a range of fields and to learn more about the many resources the Global Studies Center offers. Participants will work with Global Studies core faculty members and instructional design specialists on their globally oriented courses, workshop their syllabi with other members of the group, and receive a research grant of $1,200 for their participation. The seminar will have a maximum of 10 participants. It will take place in May 2024; exact dates will be announced shortly. All the sessions will take place in-person and Zoom and be facilitated by Dr. Michael Goodhart, Professor of Political Science. Participants are expected to attend all sessions and to do a small amount of preparatory reading. In our time together, we’ll discuss readings and approaches, workshop one another’s syllabi, and hopefully have some fun. Last year’s seminar participants proposed courses on Food Insecurity, Feminist Theory, and Fragments in the Classics (to name just a few). We encourage you to propose a course that excites you, invigorates you, and that you think could benefit from a more global approach.

We encourage submissions from professors in the SW PA, Ohio, West Virginia, trying to diversify and decolonize their course materials, whether that means stepping away from a purely Euro-American approach, adding more interdisciplinarity to a syllabus, or exploring noncanonical approaches to classic topics. We also encourage professors who have Global Studies experience and simply want a workshop space in which to develop a new course for the future.

Outside the seminar sessions, participants will meet with instructional consultants from Pitt’s Center for Teaching and Learning who are knowledgeable about their disciplines or, if this is not possible for faculty from other campuses and colleges, with equivalent consultants at their home institutions. This will allow them to discuss ways of tailoring their syllabi to the needs of their students and their fields.

ELIGIBILITY: The seminar, which will take place in Spring 2024, is open to full-time faculty members at any university and college. We aim to bring together people with varied disciplinary backgrounds and teaching experience. Faculty who are new to college teaching are particularly encouraged to apply.

REMUNERATION: Faculty who participate in the seminar will receive $1,200 from the Global Studies Center. Whenever possible, they will be remunerated via transfers to their research accounts; when this is not possible, we can arrange a payroll disbursement, but such disbursements are subject to taxation. Payment will be processed once participants submit their final (new or revised) syllabi.

TO APPLY: Interested faculty should submit a brief statement about the course they plan to revise or develop (the subject, class size, students it attracts, requirements it fulfills, frequency with which it is/will be taught, reasons for wanting to “globalize” it), a short version of their C.V., and if they are revising an existing course, a copy of the existing syllabus. Applications should be sent to Veronica Dristas dristas@pitt.edu.

DEADLINE: March 15th, 2024