With each global health crisis, the interconnectedness of populations around the globe becomes more pronounced. Diseases not only affect the health of communities, but they have a profound impact on political, economic, and social stability within countries and regions. This course engages the interdisciplinary nature of global health by approaching the issue through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) developed by the United Nations. The SDGs range in focus from good health and well-being to gender equality to clean water and sanitation to affordable, clean energy. By engaging the ways that health has a stake in these goals, the course will bring the expertise of faculty from the University of Pittsburgh and CMU as well as practitioners to understand and address the issue surrounding global health from a myriad of perspectives and avenues. With an applied focus, the course will assist students in engaging and advocating for a community on a global health issue through a policy memo. This iteration of the course will examine gender equality and SDG #5.

Together the African Studies, Global Studies, and Russian/East European Studies Centers are organizing a career networking trip to Washington D.C. on February 20-21, 2020. Students will meet with experts and alumni in various fields in order to learn about different career opportunities and gain an insider’s perspective on the different organizations in Washington, D.C. Meetings will be arranged into four different content areas:

• Global Health
• Human Rights/Human Security
• International Security and Diplomacy
• International Development

Along with scheduled meetings at consulting firms, think tanks, non-profits, and government agencies there will be a reception to meet UCIS and Pitt alumni. Pending funding, up to forty students will be selected to go with representation from all the centers.

This language table has moved online. Contact Dijana Mujkanovic (dim31@pitt.edu) for more information.

Practice your Bosnian, Serbian, or Croatian language skills at our weekly language table.

Students from Korea National University of Education who are a part of Pitt's English Language Institute will be presenting their research posters on U.S. culture. Come by to celebrate their hard work and learn about their findings!

The Global Studies Center looks forward to beginning a monthly, informal social hour - hosted by Global Studies Ambassadors and fellow GSC students Mark, Sarah and Destiny - as a way to get to know other like-minded Global Studies students.

Please note this meeting is postponed until further notice. Contact Areti Papanastasiou (areti.papanastasiou@pitt.edu) with any questions.

Practice your Modern Greek language skills - all levels welcome!

Join Professor Robert Hellyer of Wake Forest University for a discussion on the socio-economic history of green tea in America and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Soon after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan dramatically expanded tea production—especially of high-quality sencha green tea—specifically to meet demand from the United States, then a green tea consuming nation. This presentation will outline that export trade highlighting how tea production helped to ease social tensions in the nascent Japanese nation-state by providing employment for Tokugawa retainers who had opposed the new central regime during the Boshin War (1868-1869). It will also explain the ways in which a change in American tastes—the 1920s’ embrace of black teas produced in South Asia—brought a decline in Japanese tea exports to the United States. Facing a glut, Japanese tea merchants aggressively marketed sencha at home for the first time, emphasizing its health benefits. As a result, more Japanese began to consume sencha, setting in motion a trend that made that type of green tea the definitive daily beverage it remains today.

Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh National Consortium for Teaching About Asia and the Asian Studies Center, University Center for East Asian Studies

This talk introduces the social scientist and economic philosopher, Wang Yanan, and his 1930s Chinese critique of the Austrian School of Economics. Wang was an original translator of Marx, Smith, and Ricardo, and by the late 1930s, he had turned his attention to the seeming "common sense" of the Austrians in order to thoroughly refute their flat version of the world. Part of my recently published book "The Magic of Concepts" (Duke University Press 2017), this talk presents a historical consideration of capitalist economic concepts as they helped shape Chinese understandings of their simultaneously local and global worlds.

Please note this meeting is now happening online. Contact Luana Reis (lreis@pitt.edu) for more information.