Ambassador Steve Mull shares the details of global partnerships and expansion in the works at Global Affairs for 2024.

Stepheney Odom–Thomas is a 3rd year student double majoring in Global Studies Environments and Sustainability and Foreign Affairs with a minor in Korean Language and Literature. She shares how global immersion at UVA helped her find her intersts and encourages all students to get involved.

When Colton Arney was a senior in high school, his English teacher told him about a program that would help set the trajectory for his UVA career. By the end of that fall, he had become a linguistics champion.

This January, UVA students participated in 18 January-term study abroad courses that took them to places as distant and diverse as Ecuador, the United Arab Emirates, India, Kenya, and Vietnam, among other places.

January-Term or J-term as it is popularly known meets at the start of the year and is designed to foster interest in diverse topics students might not have an opportunity to explore during the year. It concludes in mid-January.

UVA Global spoke to four faculty who offered the courses this year about their offerings.

Yafrainy Familia is a PhD student in Spanish at UVA. She spoke about her project where she analyzes the work of a series of contemporary Caribbean artists through the lenses of colonial resistance, gender, and race.

Misa Layne reflects on the J-term class to China and shares how fun, yet competitive game of Ping Pong can be extrapolated to the real world and to international relations.

Abdallah Aljerjawi encourages us to not let differences be a stumbling block, but let to them be a driving force for a shared humanity