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  • Academia Meets Policy: Partnering with Think Tanks to Improve Student Experiences

    Apr 23, 2025 11:00 am16 views

    This past February, I had the privilege and pleasure of being invited to Spain to attend the School For Thinktankers 2025, sponsored by the organization On Think Tanks (OTT) at Fundació Bofill in Barcelona. The weeklong training seminar started with an inspiring welcome session, setting the stage for an exciting week of learning, collaboration, and growth. As the Center for Global Studies (CGS) is launching a new Master of Science in Global Studies (MSGS) with 3 tracks including Global Governance, Global Security, and Gender and Public Policy, partnering with think tanks to collaborate, create student internships, and develop opportunities for students to present work and publish is a strategic focus of the center. Through the new master’s degree, CGS can offer avenues for networking, increased exposure to, and engagement with think tanks across the world.

  • CGS Faculty Affiliates Recognized in LAS Faculty Awards Announcement

    Apr 3, 2025 4:00 pm14 views

    We are proud to celebrate the achievements of two Center for Global Studies (CGS) faculty affiliates who have recently been honored through the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) faculty awards and announcements.

  • Arts and Education without Borders: The 9th Annual Globalizing the Community College Curricula Conference 2025

    Feb 12, 2025 2:45 pm21 views

    The 9th Annual Globalizing the Community College Curricula Conference 2025: Arts and Education without Borders conference was an immensely successful conference that will positively impact the Global Studies Program at Heartland Community College (HCC) in Normal, Illinois. The conference featured “innovative strategies and best practices for integrating global perspectives into community college curricula through the arts” and followed through with a diverse speaker lineup that provided multiple subject examples ranging from philosophy, art, composition, anthropology, and political science.  

  • Scholarly Publishing in the Globalization Context: A Glimpse into the Relationship Between Global Market and Global Welfare

    Dec 19, 2024 4:30 pm48 views

    In 2022, when I was in the process of applying to the MSLIS program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I attended the KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. (KGL) PubFactory Virtual Series, which had a session about the impact of globalization on scholarly publishing presented by KGL’s Director of Consulting, Kevin Lomangino. Lomangino pointed out that the western countries used to have absolute dominance in the scholarly publishing industry, which went hand in hand with the dominance of English-speaking countries, but due to globalization, this dominance was challenged. China was gaining more power in scholarly publishing as it strived to collaborate with researchers from all over the world, especially those coming from the Middle East and Asia, and publish quality research in the world's highest impact journals. Globalization was not a new trend, but journal publishers were increasingly noticing the impact of globalization on the scholarly publishing industry, and whoever ignored the global trend would potentially miss out on revenue opportunities. Scholars in regions such as Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East were seizing the opportunities to expand their research output and global outreach, which increasingly diversified scholarly communication.

  • Care Work and Climate Change, Feminist Perspectives under the Neoliberal Economic Malestream

    Dec 16, 2024 1:45 pm38 views

    I once heard a story about an ordinary rural woman. Born in a small village in southeast China in the 1970s, she had four siblings, two older sisters, one younger sister, and one youngest brother. Her family was not rich. At that time, a small household in a small village in that area relied mostly on small-scale farming, rice, sugarcane, tea, and cattle breeding. Children were a promising source of labor that could translate into economic growth for the family in the future. Therefore, before China's one-child policy, it was not uncommon to see a household with five, six, seven or more children.

  • Mastheads from the 2024 ASI newspapers.

    International and Area Studies Library joins 2025 Global Press Archive Area Studies Initiative with CGS support

    Dec 16, 2024 11:30 am19 views

    Recently, the International and Area Studies Library (IASL) at the University of Illinois pooled US Department of Education, Title VI National Resource Center funding from the Center for Global Studies, Center for African Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center to make important historical newspapers available Open Access through the Global Press Archives' 2025 Area Studies Initiative.

  • Students Reimagine the Future in Global Sustainability Competition

    Dec 9, 2024 4:30 pm34 views

    On December 7, 2024, 14 teams from across the globe gathered via Zoom for the 4th annual Reimagine Our Future sustainability competition award ceremony. The competition brought together 249 students from 11 institutions in the USA, UK, Ukraine, South Africa, China, Austria, Colombia, and Italy, who spent eight weeks crafting innovative solutions for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and showcasing contributions of diverse disciplines such as engineering, health sciences, agriculture, and architecture to sustainability through factsheets. 

  • Professor Manfred Steger speaks about reglobalization.

    Professor Manfred Steger's recent visit culminated with his talk "Globalization at a Crossroads: Deglobalization or Reglobalization?”

    Nov 11, 2024 12:30 pm61 views

    The Center for Global Studies hosted prominent globalization scholar Professor Manfred Steger (Professor and Chair, Sociology, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa), co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study. On Monday, October 7th, Professor Steger gave a talk titled “Globalization at a Crossroads: Deglobalization or Reglobalization?” making a case that the world is in an era of reglobalization fueled by exponentially increasing “disembodied globalization.” 

  • ISRL 2024 cohort and staff and faculty organizers

    International Studies Research Lab hosts 12 fellows from across U.S.

    Oct 14, 2024 11:45 am7 views

    The Center for Global Studies ran the International Studies Research Lab (ISRL) this summer, making its first full in-person session since the Covid-19 pandemic. This blog post summarizes the lab, its purpose, and highlights three of the eleven projects developed through the ISRL.

  • Migration, Religion, and Technology in Rural Cambodia

    Sep 25, 2024 1:00 pm31 views

    During the summer of 2024, I traveled to Cambodia to conduct field research for my dissertation. I was there to study foreign aid, public finances, and how the Cambodian government negotiated loan terms. While studying these mass flows of international capital I came across money that was crossing borders in smaller amounts but was perhaps even more interesting.

  • Reimagine Our Future

    Sep 17, 2024 3:45 pm17 views

    Reimagine Our Future invites undergraduates to use their critical and creative thinking skills to develop ideas supporting United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  

  • CGS Associate Director Donna Tonini and conference participants at conference dinner at Morskie Oko in Rynek Główny, Kraków, Poland

    Investigating Intersections of the Local and Global: Exploring Migration Trends in Kraków, Poland

    Aug 19, 2024 4:30 pm48 views
  • Flyer for event

    CGS Hosted Dr. Eve Darian-Smith for Recent Talk, “World on Fire: Anti-Democracy and Anti- Environmentalism”

    Mar 25, 2024 10:45 am43 views

    The Center for Global Studies hosted Professor Eve Darian-Smith (Professor and Chair, Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine) as part of the MillerComm 2024 Lecture Series sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study on March 4th, 2023. This blog post summarizes the talk and provides further information on learning more about the topics discussed.

  • Congratulations to “The Chancellor’s Call to Action Research Projects for 2024-25” Awards Recipients

    Mar 1, 2024 2:45 pm33 views

    The Center for Global Studies (CGS) congratulates CGS Faculty Affiliates Faranak Miraftab, Ken Salo, Scott Althaus, Anita Chan, Yannick Kluch, Teresa Ann Barnes, James Kilgore, Ian Brooks and former CGS Graduate Assistant Atyeh Ashtari for receiving the 2024-2025 Chancellor Jones Call to Action Research Program awards. The Chancellor’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Justice Research Program 2024-2025 awarded 12 research programs focused on systemic racial inequalities and injustice in our communities and higher education. 

  • Kainen Bell CGS Spotlight

    Feb 20, 2024 8:45 am73 views

    CGS would like to congratulate PhD student Kainen Bell for his recent selection as a Global Policy Fellow at the Institute for Technology & Society (ITS) in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Kainen was one of ten researchers selected worldwide who share common interests in technology and its interfaces with Law, and expanding their knowledge about the Brazilian technological context. The intensive four-week program will take place in July, and includes a series of meetings with ITS partners in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, and São Paulo. 

  • CGS Congratulates its Faculty Recipients of the College of LAS Teaching and Advising Awards

    Feb 19, 2024 9:45 am16 views

  • Premodern Unfreedoms: Global Approaches to Exploitation, Enslavement, and Trafficking’ Conference at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 27-28, 2023

    Feb 6, 2024 9:45 am78 views

  • Students from Champaign-Urbana, Springfield, Austria, Britain, and Ukraine Competed in the Finals of Reimagine Our Future hosted at UIUC on December 2

    Jan 29, 2024 11:30 am79 views
  • Quatar Dabates Participants

    Qatar Debate 4th US Debate Championship

    Oct 30, 2023 10:15 am72 views

    Qatar Debates' 4th US Debate Championship, October 14-15, 2023.

  • EDU2.0 classroom

    Education 2.0 in Egypt: Research & Documentation Project

    Oct 24, 2023 11:45 am17 views

    Recent years have witnessed significant educational reforms in Egypt through the Education 2.0 initiative (often abbreviated EDU 2.0) that looks to expand skills-based learning and digital learning methods. University of Illinois Professor of Education Linda Herrera has worked with Dr. Tarek Shawki, Minister of Education and Technical Education (2017-2022) to not just chronicle the monumental educational reform, but also create an archive of primary source materials about this transformation that intends to benefit students, instructors, researchers, and stakeholders in the education sector.

  • Global Studies Consortium at Aarhus University in Denmark, September 21-23, 2023

    Oct 24, 2023 11:15 am32 views

    From September 21 - 23, 2023, the Center for Global Studies participated in several days of conversation and discussion with fellow members of the Global Studies Consortium at Aarhus University in Denmark. 

  • States with Colleges Impacted by ISRL, 2016-2023

    Globalizing Curricula: The 2023 International Studies Research Lab

    Sep 18, 2023 4:30 pm35 views

  • Policy Brief: Closing the Education Gap for Indigenous Peoples by Adriene Lane, M.Ed.

    Aug 3, 2023 10:30 am24 views

    “Indigenous Peoples have less access to quality primary and secondary education than other groups, due to the lack of education that respects their cultures and languages. Minority languages, which are spoken by Indigenous Peoples, are often not used for official purposes, including in education. Students whose home languages differ from those taught at school have lower test results and reading scores. Early mother tongue education improves students' performance in their second language and other subjects, and is more cost-effective than second language instruction.” - Adriene Lane.

    To view the full Policy Brief by Adriene Lane, click here.

  • University of Illinois’ CGS and CEAPS partner with Heartland to globalize education on campus by Zach Petrea, July 2023

    Jul 18, 2023 1:45 pm44 views
  • A word cloud made through text analysis of the items in the featured collection

    Surveying the Coming Storm: Works on Nationalism Prior to WWII

    Jul 7, 2023 12:45 pm285 views

    With the benefit of hindsight, modern scholars can identify unbridled nationalism as a leading cause of World War II. However, it is crucial to explore whether scholars of the time foresaw the impending storm caused by nationalist movements in the first half of the 20th century and if they could have predicted the grave, mass-scale atrocities that unfolded. To shed light on the perspectives of scholars from a century ago, the IAS library has curated a Hathi Trust collection titled "Surveying the Coming Storm: Works on Nationalism Prior to WWII."

  • Successful Global Intersections Spring Project Awardees

    Apr 24, 2023 10:45 am43 views

  • CGS Congratulates its Affiliates and Recipients of LAS Dean’s Awards and Faculty Honors

    Apr 14, 2023 4:45 pm32 views

  • IGI SPRING 2023 CAREER DAY

    Apr 5, 2023 3:15 pm17 views

  • Impressive Illinois presence at the CIES Conference in Washington D.C. in February

    Mar 22, 2023 9:30 am123 views

    At the CIES Conference in Washington D.C. in February.


  • 15th Annual Meeting of the Illinois Language and Linguistics Society

    Dec 9, 2022 2:30 pm54 views

    Upcoming submission deadline for 15th Annual Conference of the ILLS

  • Chancellor's Call To Action Recipients (clockwise from top-left): Steve Witt, Faranak Miraftab, Ken Salo, Ellen Moodie, Barbara Hug, Annie Abbott, Melissa Goodnight, Scott Althaus, Vinisha Singh Basnet

    Congratulations to “The Chancellor’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program” Awards Recipients

    Nov 11, 2022 9:30 am173 views

    The Center for Global Studies (CGS) congratulates Steve Witt, Director of CGS, CGS Faculty Affiliates Faranak Miraftab, Annie Abbott, Scott Althaus, Melissa Goodnight, Barbara Hug, Ellen Moodie, and Ken Salo, and former CGS Graduate Assistant Vinisha Singh Basnet, for receiving the 2022-2023 Chancellor Jones Call to Action Research Program awards.

  • Donna Tonini, Eman Saadah and Raquel Castro Goebel posing in front of the desert backdrop

    Highlighting Teaching Excellence at the Faculty Retreat

    Jun 21, 2022 10:45 am64 views

    Each year UIUC holds a faculty retreat to promote teaching excellence, and awards faculty retreat grants that enable recipients to design and implement an instructional enhancement that has a high probability of improving education at Illinois. The theme of the 2022 annual faculty retreat was “Breaking Down the Garden Walls: A Promise of Access to Success.” The retreat highlighted the practices and approaches implemented by faculty across campus as they work towards a campus culture that fosters student success.  At the retreat, CGS Associate Director Donna Tonini caught up with CGS Affiliates Professor Eman Saadah, Director of the Less Commonly Taught Languages Program and Director and Language Coordinator of Arabic, and Professor Raquel Castro Goebel, the Portuguese Language Program Director, and an instructor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.

  • How do we know what we know about the climate change?

    May 5, 2022 8:45 am309 views

    This 8-module introductory course on numerous aspects of Climate Change is an attempt to educate students about the basics of this spiralling global problem. This was developed as part of the 2019-20 Global Intersections Program of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

  • The Housing Assembly, distributing food during the pandemic in informal settlements of Cape Town, South Africa

    Constructing transnational solidarities in radical care and democracy through digital feminist storytelling

    Apr 28, 2022 2:00 pm93 views

    In this post, you will read about a Global Intersections project proposed by two graduate students in Urban and Regional Planning Department that received funding from CGS. Global Intersections is a Center for Global Studies (CGS) initiative designed to encourage multicultural, international, transnational, and global perspectives in student research. This project aims for creating a digital storytelling platform using a critical feminist storytelling methodology.

  • FLAS Alumni Career Panel Poster

    Career Opportunities in Foreign Language and Area Studies

    Apr 12, 2022 2:15 pm81 views

    On October 26, 2021, Center for Global Studies (CGS) held a virtual “FLAS Alumni Career Panel,” that focused on the strategies for using foreign language and area studies skills on the job market for current and recent graduate students.  This blog post discusses this event and explores the key role that foreign language and area studies education can play in career succes.  

  • Nathan Sonnenschein

    Global Studies, Librarianship, and the Job Market

    Mar 31, 2022 3:00 pm69 views

    Nathan Sonnenschein, a former graduate assistant at the Center for Global Studies, discusses how his experiences at CGS prepared him for the job market.

  • A map showing that institutions at 14 US states have been impacted by the ISRL.

    The Impact of the 2021 International Studies Research Lab

    Nov 17, 2021 12:00 pm64 views

    Through the International Studies Research Lab (ISRL), the Center for Global Studies and collaborating centers leverage the campus’ expertise and vast library resources to support the development of international and area studies programming in community colleges across the country, providing access to important US Department of Education Title VI resources to institutions and regions without direct access to these important grant funds.

  • Returning to French Archives Amid the Pandemic

    Oct 27, 2021 1:15 pm202 views

    International travel to France and French archives in year two of the pandemic.

  • April 2021 iSEE Congress “The Future of Water”

    May 19, 2021 3:30 pm27 views

    This year’s Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at University of Illinois (iSEE) Congress was co-organized with the Center for Global Studies, in partnership with the Illinois Global Institute and the Joint Area Centers Symposium (JACS), four of which are funded through U.S. Department of Education Title VI grants.  The series of Zoom events brought together a diverse group of researchers, educators, journalists and activists to address global water crises under the rubric of “The Future of Water”, and to introduce the Illinois campus and community to cutting-edge thinking from highly influential scholars on topics ranging from drought to the global politics of water to pollution, public health, and biodiversity. 

  • SAOA logo

    SAOA: The South Asian Open Archives

    Apr 6, 2021 12:00 pm171 views

    The South Asian Open Archive (SAOA) is an initiative that makes open access materials on South Asia available for teaching and research.

  • Steur 1

    At Home with Over 170 Million News Stories: My Assistantship with the Cline Center over Covid-19

    Apr 2, 2021 3:45 pm284 views

    PhD student, James Steur, talks about his experiences during Covid-19.

  • Syndemics and Coronavirus: The Social Dimensions of Public Health Crises

    Mar 11, 2021 2:30 pm531 views

    Can we deepen our understanding of the current COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing it as a syndemic?

  • “Global Education Symposium,” October 14-17, 2020

    Dec 17, 2020 12:00 pm52 views

    Proving stronger than an epidemic, the University of Illinois College of Education and Office of International Programs presented the “Global Education Symposium” on October 14-17, 2020.  Educators and students from around the world shared knowledge and personal thoughts, albeit, through the travel agent known as Zoom. 

  • Kim Sheahan Sanford

    Spurlock Museum Big History Project

    Dec 11, 2020 12:00 pm142 views

    Hi. I’m Kim Sheahan Sanford, the Spurlock Museum’s assistant director of education, and I have a confession to make. Sixth graders are my favorite students on earth. They are willing to suspend disbelief as I tell them a myth or a folktale, but they also latch onto adult concepts, like reincarnation and the development of complex writing systems.

  • Web Archiving and the Global Response to COVID-19

    Jun 2, 2020 12:00 pm64 views

    One doesn’t need to look far to see how much the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the world, halting the mobility of people and goods that we took for granted as critical components of the global economy. This crisis has put a strain on nearly every system of our global society, impacting every sector of civil society. To attempt to preserve some of the initial reactions and concerns brought about the health emergency, the Center for Global Studies and the International and Area Studies Library began archiving websites of civil society organizations around the world as they respond to this crisis.