World Class Research and Learning
Over 230 University of Pittsburgh faculty members are affiliated with the Global Studies Center. Their teaching expertise and research specializations support our certificate program and research initiatives. Each academic year, they teach hundreds of courses on global themes in 35 departments and schools.
Interested in becoming a faculty affiliate of the GSC? If your research and teaching foci relate at least 25% to the GSC’s themes and use a trans-national and interdisciplinary approach, please complete the online UCIS Faculty Survey and send your current CV to Veronica Dristas. Once your request has been reviewed, you will receive an email informing you of your affiliation.
Our Research Initiatives
Critical World Ecologies
The Global Studies Center’s Critical World Ecologies initiative assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars, activists, artists, curators, policy-makers, and writers from on and beyond our campus to explore the broad transnational and world-historical processes that condition how humans think about and exploit nature as well as the contemporary social, cultural, economic, and political relations through which environments are continually reproduced.
Global Health
The Global Studies Center’s Global Health initiative seeks to nurture campus-wide cooperation on curricular and programmatic initiatives related to global health. Our aim is to promote the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of global health among students and faculty by creating spaces for collaboration among scholars. In particular, we seek to understand the global burden of disease, social determinants of health, and treatment disparities from transnational and historical perspectives that are also attentive to the varied cultural and behavioral elements of health.
Migration
The Global Studies Migrations Initiative asks how different forms of movement, mobility, and displacement might be studied beyond categorical and national boundaries in ways that take account of the shifting terrains that constitute migrations. GSC fosters interdisciplinary academic partnerships on migration and refugees that focus on the processes driving people to move. We theorize migration, displacement, gentrification and other related phenomena with attention to local-global connections, exploring factors such as the changing nature of national borders, transnational regulation and governance, and broader social, economic, and political factors that affect people's movements, with special attention to the human costs of migration.
Contested Cities
Cities are terrains of social and political contestation. It is projected that 70% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, and cities are major engines of both economic growth and socio-economic inequality. Cities are central nodes in networks of translocal and transnational migration, including immigration, gentrification, and trafficking; they are at the forefront of efforts to adapt to anthropogenic climate change and address environmental injustices; they are, increasingly, arenas in which people mobilize to demand human rights to food, water, health, housing, education, and human dignity. In short, cities are the sites where many contemporary struggles for social justice unfold.
The Global Studies Center’s Contested Cities initiative seeks to situate these trends and developments in global and world-historical perspective, paying particular attention to the transnational processes – such as the financialization of housing, the privatization of water, the militarization of policing, and the localization of human rights and democracy– that have converged to make cities exemplary of contemporary globalization.
Funding Opportunities for Faculty
The Global Studies Center offers numerous types of faculty support to our Center Affiliates, such as our Global Studies Faculty Fellowship and Global Academic Partnership (GAP).