Global processes, exchanges, and movements have remapped the contemporary world. Global Studies courses seek to provide a coherent critical framework with which to study such increasingly fluid cultural and national crossings. Global Studies faculty members, working in the disciplines of Asian Studies, history, and literature, have been engaged in rethinking previous assumptions about history and cartography. Their courses tend to reframe familiar histories as well as to uncover unfamiliar routes of human interaction. These classes adopt interdisciplinary approaches that help bring to light historic concerns that otherwise might be rendered invisible.

Examples of Global Studies offerings include courses on the intersection of cultures surrounding the Mediterranean; overlapping colonial and postcolonial histories of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America; linked Pacific Rim cultures, for example, shared histories among peoples from the western coast of the Americas, the Philippines, and Japan; intertwined histories and literatures of Africa and the Americas in light of the concept of a Black Atlantic; and homologous literatures and histories of native peoples from different geographic regions.

For course descriptions, see Asian Studies, History, and Literature.