Eren Okandan is a third-year student majoring in global public health who loves to read crime fiction, and follows sports such as Formula 1, soccer, basketball, and football. Originally from Kayseri, Turkey, a city located in central Anatolia, Okandan has been helping raise awareness about the recent deadly earthquake in Turkey that has claimed more than 50,000 people.
The U.S. Department of State has named the University of Virginia as a Fulbright U.S. Student Program Top Producing Institution for the 2022-23 academic year.
Join the UVA Center for Politics’ for an event with Juan Gabriel Valdés, Ambassador of Chile to the USA. Ambassador Valdés will participate in a dialogue with Professor Thomas Klubock.
As classes wrap up this December, among them will be a series of courses in the Engagements curriculum that bring first-year students out of their worlds and into the global.
Though the Buddha never visited Gandhara, it became a second holy land of Buddhism. A distinctive sculptural style emerged in the region and flourished from the 1st to the 5th centuries CE.
The East Asia Center is pleased to host Yuan Julian Chen, Franklin Humanities Fellow at Duke University's Global Asia Initiative and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.
Vice Provost for Global Affairs says that during his visit to India, they discovered a remarkable range of opportunities of potential interest and benefit to UVA even beyond the already successful engagement in India with the Yamuna project
Elizabeth Wittner has run a volunteer-led program for English speaking and intercultural exchange since 1999 but notices serious interest from students who want to help in the last couple of years after the pandemic.This year, she says, more than 400 volunteers applied to the program, which is a part of the Center for American English Language and Culture (CAELC). She and her team were able to place 352 volunteers in various capacities.
A weeklong trip by Ambassador Steve Mull and a UVA delegation to India from September 12-17 brings into focus the long and deep relationship the University of Virginia has enjoyed with the world’s second-most populous nation and look to take it to a higher level.
This summer, a group of UVA professors and graduate students traveled to Makhanda, South Africa to co-design a new space with The Black Power Station, a DIY, self-managed, community-driven art space and organization. The project was funded by a Three Cavaliers grant, which supports professors from multiple disciplines and their students, to create collaborative interdisciplinary projects.
On August 16th, as UVA’s campus slowly wakes up from its summer slumber, a group of volunteers in baby blue shirts run out in the rain to greet a bus arriving from Dulles airport. These are the Global Greeters, UVA’s welcoming committee for international students.
Double-Hoo Alex Misbach takes us back to Shea House from the perspective of the Programs Facilitator and a Russian language instructor. His advice? Think critically in your language learning, take advantage of language immersion opportunities at UVA, and, if you can, go abroad and get out of your comfort zone!
In April 2022, the Center for Global Health Equity hosted 15 colleagues from partner institutions in Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda for the CGHE Global Partnerships Workshop to hear about current global health research and student engagement opportunities. Other topics discussed in the workshops organized over a week in Charlottesville included new grant opportunities to develop research capacity; opportunities for educational training; and shared priorities for further research and advocacy.
Five shining faces sit around a table of food and wine on Charlottesville’s downtown mall. This is not an ordinary family outing though, rather a meeting of community activists from around the world.
Archeologists Nick Bon-Harper and Susan Palazzo from Rivanna Archeological Services have spent time on the walkway behind Hotel A searching for signs of the past.
Mary Byron graduated in December 2021 with a bachelor’s in Cognitive Science with a Neuroscience concentration and was awarded Highest Distinction from the cognitive science distinguished majors program. Growing up in Reston, Virginia, Byron chose the Global First program and spent the first semester in London, United Kingdom and credits it as key to her UVA experience.
UVA’s strategic goal to create opportunities for every undergraduate to have an international experience before graduation – our critical mission in Global Affairs – begs a fundamental question: what exactly is an international experience?
As the cancellations followed for different global internships scheduled for the summer, Ingrid Hakala, director of global internships didn’t give up. Instead, she reached out to her partners, who would host students in different countries. With their partnership, she launched an experimental virtual global internship program for UVA students.
In a conversation, Elizabeth Wittner, Academic Director and ITA Program Coordinator describes this unique program at UVA and how it provides support to international members, promotes global experiences, and fosters intercultural skills and perspectives at UVA.
COVID-19 struck earlier this year just as UVA was making strong progress on its global aspirations with a record number of study abroad and globally-themed research programs, a growing population of international students, a quickening pace of internationally-themed events on Grounds, and ever more ‘Hoos moving on to global careers from the Peace Corps to private enterprise. As we prepare for extended operations under the pandemic, we struggle with the uncertainty of when borders will reopen, visa processing will resume, and safe travel will return.
Sara Krivacsy is graduating from UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences with a Global Public Health major and Anthropology minor. She is planning to become a practitioner in global public health at a time of unprecedented change and challenge. She reflects on her experiences at UVA and how it has expanded her perspective for global engagement.
Erica Stephens is getting ready to graduate next month with major in Cognitive Science and a minor in Health & Wellbeing from University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Science.
When Steve Monaghan graduated from University of Virginia in 1980 in Asian Studies, he didn’t know that his fluency in written and spoken Chinese would shape his life and career for the next four decades.
The J-term courses offered at the University of Virginia this January provided a unique opportunity for students to engage in global topics, gain new perspectives, and go beyond the classroom virtually.
UVA is in the top 12 U.S. universities for short-term study abroad programs, according to the annual Open Doors report released Nov. 16 by the Institute of International Education, a New York-based nonprofit.
Building back UVA’s global engagement will be one of the more exciting and urgent challenges we face as a University as we emerge from the COVID shadow in the coming months. Since evacuating hundreds of our students and faculty from locations around the world beginning last January, we’ve suffered a painful retrenchment of our education abroad programs that will continue through the coming spring semester and significantly curtailed our global research activity.
More than 395 UVA students took virtual language classes this summer which included French, Italian and Spanish. Among them was Giovanna de Almeida, a 4th year student majoring in Psychology and minoring in Sociology.
Few elections have had more significant implications for the future of America’s engagement with the world, including in the field of higher education, than this year’s just-concluded ballot.
For Global Week this year, Office of the Vice Provost for Global Affairs, Advancement and ISO hosted a series of panel called Global Journeys with distinguished UVA alumni and students who shared their global experiences and career paths. Watch the conversations here.
As programs moved to online and virtual worlds due to the pandemic, CAELC’S Volunteers with International Students, Staff, and Scholars (VISAS) Program is keeping up with the changes.
Americans bid a sad farewell to legendary jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg in recent weeks, simultaneously celebrating her extraordinary contributions over 50 years to advancing gender equality and other important human rights issues in the United States. Justice Ginsburg’s life affirmed what all of us in international education have long known to be an essential truth: that study and research abroad transform and enrich individual lives, and more broadly, the character of nations.
Six months after the COVID-19 pandemic upended American life, we’ve experienced more than enough of its sweeping negative impacts across every part of our society. Nevertheless, we know from history that societies tend to emerge from pandemics with greater resilience, innovation, and intellectual and economic growth.
Last month, I wrote about UVA’s exciting return to study abroad with up to 300 students planning to participate in overseas programs during the coming semester after the COVID-related drought in international travel over the past two years. But that is only a part of the story in
This month as epidemiologists study the potential threat from the omicron variant, pandemic hospitalizations rise with the onset of winter, and travel requirements tighten again, Global Affairs is pleased to celebrate a small but important victory over COVID.
Marcel Durieux is a professor in Anesthesiology and Neurological Surgery at the University of Virginia Health and has worked on number of global health projects in East Africa, all involving training in anesthesiology.
This past summer while most of us took a break, UVA English professor Steve Parks persevered day and night to bring noted Burmese political prisoner and democracy activist Myo Yan Naung Thein to Grounds as a visiting researcher for the fall semester.
Avni Garg is the co-director for the international student affairs agency on student council. A third-year UVA student, she is double majoring in Computer Science and Economics and also volunteering as a VISAS language consultant.
One of most serious impacts of COVID-19 on UVA’s mission last year was the sudden cancellation of every one of our study abroad programs. Between January and March of 2020, we scrambled to support the return of over 400 of our students, researchers, and faculty back to the United
In spring 2021, Center for Global Inquiry + Innovation in the Office of the Vice Provost for Global Affairs announced a new round of grants to support global research for faculty.
