international_studies

International Studies Program

The International Studies (INTS) Program has existed at Trinity since 1969, and its curriculum focuses on the interdisciplinary study of world regions and global interrelations. INTS currently houses six majors: African Studies, Asian Studies, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, Middle East Studies, Russian and Eurasian Studies, and Global Studies. Most recently, the INTS program has outlined its “Learning Goals” under four tenets which include 1) a depth of knowledge about one or more world regions, 2) the situating of this knowledge in comparative context, 3) completion of meaningful research and written argument (statistical, archival, ethnographic, oral, artistic, literary, visual), and 4) the expression of ideas in clear, articulate, and persuasive oral rhetoric in conversation, class, and formal presentations.

The International Studies Program was first developed at Trinity as part of broad curriculum changes undertaken in the late 1960s, which began under President Albert Jacobs and continued under President Theodore Lockwood.¹⁾ The foremost advocate for the introduction of a program in Non-Western cultures was Professor of English Richard P. Benton. Though he had pushed for such a program in the mid-1960s, it was not until school-wide curricular change was well under way that his suggestion was seriously considered by the Curriculum Committee. It was Benton’s belief that the College’s primary focus on Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Western European cultures ought to be expanded to include a broader range of global traditions. As a member of the Curriculum Committee himself, Professor Benton along with other committee members in favor of the idea pushed for the establishment of what was to be called the “Non-Western Studies Program.” In May 1969, a Non-Western Studies major was authorized by the Committee. The course of study initially encompassed already existing courses in subjects such as Black and Asian Studies. At this time, Non-Western Studies was considered an interdepartmental program, rather than an independent undergraduate department, listing over thirty courses from six different departments in its first official prospectus in May 1969. Students who wanted to join the program were expected to propose a personal course of study based on the courses listed for credit in Non-Western Studies, which also included about 50 additional courses offered at other colleges in the Hartford area. Upon announcement of its approval to the student body, the program received statements of interest from approximately 12 students.

As the program gained traction, students and faculty began to dedicate themselves to the Non-Western course of study, with 21 students and 13 faculty participating in the major by Spring 1971. It was during this semester that a proposal was submitted by a faculty committee to absorb the Non-Western Studies Program, along with a newly formed Black Studies Program, under a new academic department to be named Intercultural Studies (ICS). In May 1971, the proposal was approved and by January 1972, the new department officially opened for student registration. Under the direction of Professor of History H. McKim Steele, the new program featured course offerings such as The Black Novel in America, Twentieth Century African Political Thought, Introduction to Indic Studies, and Introduction to Intercultural Studies. In addition to these courses listed under ICS, related courses in other areas were strongly recommended for prospective majors; these courses fell under the categories of Asian Studies, Black Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Russian Studies, and Comparative Courses, and were offered by a range of academic departments. While the ICS Program maintained a strongly interdisciplinary approach, the basis for its creation was primarily in service of the furnishing of the Black Studies Program, and much of its curricular programming was geared towards such courses throughout the 1970s. It remained one of two interdisciplinary programs at the College, the other being Urban and Environmental Studies, and this feature of the program was very attractive to students interested in what was then seen as a non-traditional curriculum. In an enthusiastic “Open Letter” published in the October 18, 1977 issue of the Trinity Tripod, one major of the program wrote, “students must venture into other departments and assemble a comprehensive cultural study of their elected cultural area. This in itself sets the ICS student apart from other Trinity students…. Personal initiative and creativity is also encouraged in the ICS program; there is no text book to go by!”

In the 1980s, the ICS Program continued to exemplify innovative approaches to academic study, which increasingly included the deconstruction of the assumption of Western intellectual ideals as inherently superior in the landscape of a college experiencing the cultural change of the decade. Among these changes was the increase of minority students at Trinity, due to the effort of the administration to create a more diverse student body. Aside from its interdisciplinary structure, the ICS Program also received support from student minority groups such as the Trinity Coalition of Blacks, who published an article in the Trinity Tripod in November 1980 stating that their “interests are well served when non-minority faculty and students show interests in minority affairs, intellectual and social,” crediting Intercultural Studies for fostering this attitude of curiosity on campus and urging that the program be expanded. Throughout the 1980s, ICS helped to sponsor several lecturer’s visits, which included academics and artists from across disciplines with a focus in international cultures and affairs as well as American race relations. Among these lecturers were historian Roger Buckley on British Slave Abolition (1982); Indian playwright, director, and critic Balwand Gargi on Religion and Indian Folk Theatre (1982); diplomat Alan Logan on U.S. policy and South African Apartheid (1983); anthropologist Janet Bauer on cultural change in the Philippines (1984); violinist Julie Lieberman (1985); Communist dissident and Chinese author Liu Bin Yan on political and economic reforms in China (1988); and fiction writer Tatiana Tolstaia on the evolution of Soviet literature (1988).

By the mid-1980s, the Intercultural Studies Program featured two principal concentrations: Area Studies, which focused on the study of a specific culture in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or the Caribbean, and Comparative Studies, a course of study in different cultures across geographical areas. The program continued to gain popularity, and in Spring 1987 the Trinity Reporter proudly credited the program’s growth for new interest among students in studying abroad in “Third World Countries,” among which Ethiopia, Israel, Ghana, Nepal, Colombia, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Greece were listed. The program's growth was assisted by a Pew Trust grant awarded to Trinity in 1986, a portion of which was used to expand the Middle Eastern and Asian areas of the program’s language and culture offerings. By 1992, the program had grown considerably, with the Dean’s office reporting a leap in graduates from eight majors in 1982 to 27 graduating in the class of 1992. In the early 1990s the program was renamed once again, taking the title International Studies, which it retains today.

In a major development to Trinity’s curriculum at the end of 1990s, the College launched proposals for its global learning sites, consisting of Trinity-sponsored programs at academic institutions across the world. The new sites bolstered interest in the International Studies Program, which provided many opportunities for students to study abroad at these universities and colleges overseas. This prospect was new and exciting for many students and faculty at Trinity, as the Cold War had ended and initiatives to broaden the College’s international studies offerings were given more attention by a special Task Force, headed by Professor of History Dario Euraque, whose mission was to “recast the International Studies major.” This project was funded by the Ford Foundation after Trinity was selected as one of 30 academic institutions to receive a planning grant under the Foundation’s “Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies” project. One of the first programs formed with support from the grant was a college-wide yearlong co-curricular program, “Migrations, Diasporic Communities, and Transnational Identities” in 1998-99, composed of introductory and advanced courses, independent study, a faculty lecture series, an online discussion forum, and guest speakers exploring the challenges faced by global diasporic communities. As part of a comprehensive restructuring of the INTS program, the Migrations program was intended to steer the program towards a broader outlook on “issues which are global in nature,” rather than being limited to area-specific courses of study.

The INTS Program continued to undergo restructuring and curricular review into the new millennium, with the Global Education Advisory Committee performing a complete reevaluation of the College’s Study Abroad Program in 2004-05. As a result, a refined study abroad program went into effect in Fall 2006. The Committee added global learning sites in Senegal, Morocco, Korea, Thailand, Australia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and England, among others. Some sites, such as Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, and Tanzania, were removed as they failed to fulfill the Committee’s new standards for Trinity’s study abroad programs. The inauguration of Trinity’s Center for Urban and Global Studies in Fall 2007 was a significant step forward for the INTS program, as it signaled a new understanding within the College of the shrinking proximity between local and global urban settings and their challenges. Keynote speaker Professor Saskia Sassen of Columbia University spoke of this contemporary dynamic at the opening of the new Center; the Tripod issue covering the event paraphrases her speech, that, “Certain cities… are founded on many ‘circuits’ or areas of trade and services that connect them to other cities all over the world. Thus, the city ‘bursts’ from its boundaries and becomes a global city.” As Trinity moved into the 2010s and an increasingly globalized world and media, the INTS became a key actor in the development of a new co-curricular program in collaboration with the Urban International Studies program. The new initiative was proposed by Professors Garth Myers and Dario Euraque in 2012 and officially instated for the 2013-14 school year, and its mission was “to carry students to a consciousness that fuses urban challenges in our city, state, region and country with a compassionate vision of the parallel dilemmas out in the wider urban world.” The program included 28 classes in its first year, along with cultural events centering on urban education and a symposium.

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While the Cesare Barbieri and later the Trinity in Rome campus programs involved international engagements, they were grounded in the classical belief that Rome had been a major source of Western culture, which meant that they stood outside of, or possibly in opposition to, the development of International Studies at Trinity.

International Studies Program

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