In Spring 2024, I had the opportunity to teach an upper-level undergraduate course, “International Development in Comparative Perspective”, in the International Studies Major at UW-Madison. Please find below a brief description and the the syllabus for the course.

While the world has been increasingly shrinking since the advent of globalization in the 1970-80s, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought the wheels of international integration to a grinding halt by disrupting global supply chains, barricading international borders, and limiting the transnational flow of capital, labor, and commodities. However, recent events like the transnational migration of refugees to Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia, extreme climate events in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands, and destructive wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have highlighted why – now more than ever – it is important to understand our place in an interconnected and interdependent world.

This course is designed to foster such an understanding. If you’re in the later stages of your undergraduate program and are wondering how to make sense of these global events and how to address global issues, this might be the course for you. If you’re thinking about pursuing these inquiries by joining graduate school programs or international aid agencies, think-tanks, and NGOs, this might be the course for you.

Through the course of the semester, students will attend internationally themed lectures across campus, many of which are organized by Regional Centers at Institute for Regional and International Studies (IRIS). Students will then write a short reflective commentary drawing out connections of the seminar to different world events while thinking through the methods, tools, and theories used by the speaker to contextualize the specific case study. This will be followed a discussion seminar on Friday where we will deliberate over different disciplinary approaches used by speaker to address their case study. Throughout the seminar, the emphasis will be on adopting a critical, interdisciplinary, and comparative perspective to understand contemporary and historical world issues.