With the circumstances surrounding COVID-19 limiting travel, there are still ways for you to dive into global cultures and gain course credits that complement your university semester! Plus, even one virtual 3-credit course will earn you $1,500 off your CEA study center program when you can go abroad again in 2021!
CEA Study Abroad offers a range of virtual study abroad programs to suit your field of study. Plus, you’ll get to interact with students from around the world in this virtual global classroom, and dive into highly engaging cultural exploration activities that broaden your horizons from the comfort of your home. Go global, stay local -- with instructors around the world who are experts in their field, delivering a one-of-a-kind cultural experience and fulfilling credits you may already need to graduate.
Check out some of the amazing virtual study abroad courses you can mix and match to make the most of your Fall 2020 semester, and apply before August 1, 2020!
The Great Masters: Leonardo, Michelangelo & Raphael
This unique CEA course will allow you to explore High Renaissance art and architecture in Florence like an insider, and learn about the landmark works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael through virtual discussions and explorations of their masterpieces. You’ll learn about famed Florentine galleries like the Uffizi, the Academy (the David), Pitti Palace, Boboli Gardens, and the Medici Chapels. Your own critical understanding of the spectacular artistic legacy of the High Renaissance will develop through a sequence of independent assignments, group discussions in your virtual classroom, multimedia presentations, and short research reports on various aspects of iconography, style and technique.
Business Ethics & Management in a Global Context
Dive into the role of business in society, and whether business without ethics can be sustained in a world characterized by great economic uncertainty, financial insecurity, dramatic levels of inequality both within and among countries, fast-paced technological progress, stratified and sometimes contradictory legal requirements, weak global institutions, and a rampant environmental crisis.
Business Ethics raises questions about a host of widely diverse issues: executive powers, corporate governance, covert monopolies, delocalized production and outsourced labor, unmet or distorted health standards, the commercial implications of genetic research, the patents and copyrights regime, the accountability of financial institutions, businesses' employment of political action committees to influence the outcome of legislation -- along with the macro-themes of galloping technological development and the overall sustainability (ecological, economic, and social) of current production and consumption patterns.
Cinema & the City: Cinematic Representations of Florence
Florence, with its historical buildings, narrow streets and its beautiful scenery, has been used by filmmakers from all around the world over the last 60 years. This course will focus mainly on the representation of Florence as a city in both Italian and Anglo-American movies, and it will explore the main themes and the different forms addressed and used by directors. The course will also draw comparisons between the "internal" and "external" cinematic gaze on the city, between the Italian and the foreign representations of it.
This amazing virtual course will provide students with an interdisciplinary framework that brings together Film Studies, Sociology, and Cultural Studies.
Positive Psychology
Positive Psychology comprises the scientific exploration of well-being, happiness, flow, personal strengths, compassion, creativity, and characteristics of positive groups and institutions that enable their development. In this sense, rather than focusing solely on the happiness of individuals and on a self-centered approach, positive psychology also concentrates on happiness and flourishing at a group-level. Learn more about this incredible virtual CEA course and your professor in this video!
The Policies of Organized Crime: Mafia & Anti-Mafia in Italy
The purpose of this course is to demystify most of the stereotypes on the subject of the Italian Mafia, which derive from popular culture, especially films. This course analyzes the organization of Mafia groups in Italy, their codes and symbols, activities both in legal and illegal markets, their relationship to politics and society, the policies designed to control them, as well as the grassroots initiatives to reduce their risk and combat their infiltration of local economy and society. Our analysis covers the myths, theories, and realities of the Mafia, its ideology and stereotypes, government responses from a comparative perspective, as well as its developments toward transnational crime and its relation to terrorist groups.
International Finance
CEA’s Virtual International Finance course explains and analyzes the main financial challenges that companies face in an international context. Globalization, or the increasing economic integration of goods, services, and financial markets at the international level, represents both opportunities and threats for governments and enterprises.
This course provides discussions of some of the main challenges of international financial transactions. You’ll be familiarized with exchange rate determination, balance of payments, the international monetary system, the European Monetary System, and the parity conditions in real markets and financial markets. You will also examine the different derivatives for hedging (options, forwards, futures, and swaps), and exposure measurement (translation, transaction, and economic exposure).
Globalization: Politics, Culture & Global Governance
The word “globalization” is one of the more fashionable additions to the lexicon of international relations pundits have made since the end of the Cold War. Widely used, frequently abused and generally misunderstood, the term today has become so clouded in cliché and indeterminacy that it risks meaning almost nothing at all. To remedy this situation, you set out in this course to investigate, analyze and reassess the elusive historical and social concept of globalization, looking closely at its manifold forms, varied content and troubling consequences. Employing the tools of sociology and the analytical methods of political science, you’ll embark on an interdisciplinary investigation of the theory and practice of globalization while simultaneously developing the requisite skills for identifying this phenomenon in current events and situating it in the larger context of international relations.
Gender & Body Politics in Latin America
This course addresses gender and sexuality in Latin America from the late 19th century until today. Using a wide range of visual, audio, and scholarly sources students will explore different topics within gender studies, placing special emphasis on the construction of sexual identities in modern Latin America. After an initial theoretical introduction and overview of sexual and gender politics in scholarly literature, the course will focus specifically on how these issues have been expressed, contested, and debated in the region. Watch this video to hear from CEA Professor Maria Victoria Lopez about this virtual course taught from Buenos Aires, Argentina!
Haute Couture in Paris: History of Style & Fashion
We’ve come a long way from our ancient and basic need to protect ourselves from the cold and from our earliest biblical impulse to hide our nakedness. But across this modern age, most of us can now dress for pointed social, cultural and psychological purposes. And this we do, often with a vengeance, in a subtle and complex effort to affirm our values and aspired social rank, to dissimulate our many fears and insecurities, and often to proclaim our anger and attendant political agenda. Haute Couture -- the industry of luxury fashion, design and dressing up -- has always been in the spotlight of this fascinating social phenomenon.
To trace this evolution in fashion and style, this course is designed as a survey of the past 200 years of designing, making, wearing and commenting upon the clothes we wear. You’ll also focus on the many benchmarks in women's fashion -- the liberation from the corset, the introduction of pants into the women's wardrobe of fashion, the challenge to the textile industry with the arrival of mini-skirts and the explosive impact of the bikini. You will also learn the techniques and methods of creating a collection and gain the ability to analyze the aesthetic and artistic quality of designs, by considering the definitions of elegance, style and innovation.
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Disease, Wellness & Health
Every human society has a system for identifying states of health and illness, methods for treating disease, and techniques for maintaining health. This interdisciplinary course broadly surveys various systems of health and healing across cultures and different ideas about the nature and cause of illness. After tracing the development of scientific medicine to the present day, you will learn about various Western and non-Western medical systems and the cross-cultural issues that arise when they encounter the spread of scientific medicine in the modern era. You will then develop a critical perspective of the healthcare sector using the United States and Spain as case studies.
Spanish Art
This course will examine the history of Spanish art from prehistoric times to the present day. You will study in detail the artworks of the great Spanish masters with the purpose of achieving an in-depth global understanding of the subject. Instruction will delve into art terminology and how to talk about art for purposes of definitions, characteristics common to a particular movement, individual and general styles, and how the work of art provokes and stimulates the individual.
Given the wide range of material, we will focus on artists and artistic movements that have had a significant impact throughout the history of Spanish art. Medieval Romanesque, Gothic and Islamic art, Renaissance and Baroque during the Spanish Golden Age, Modernism, Surrealism, Cubism and the latest tendencies will be studied in depth. Learn more about your CEA professor and this amazing virtual course in this video!
Cross-Cultural Management
The purpose of the virtual Cross-Cultural Management course is to learn the critical role culture plays in devising effective international management strategies and techniques. It aims to highlight those areas of cultural divergence, which always challenge communication, understanding, and meaningful teamwork between people of very different cultural backgrounds. It strives to instruct us to identify our own cultural assumptions, conditioning and practices impeding our ability to positively interact with those quite different from us. And it seeks to provide you with practical, down-to-earth knowledge and a mix of basic technical skills on how both to avoid the managerial pitfalls of cultural innocence and how to employ your cultural awareness and sensitivity for effective management and action in cross-cultural settings. Learn more in this video from CEA Professor Rob Giardina about this deep-diving course!
Media & Democracy in the Digital Age
This course examines the relationship between the media and democracy with a particular emphasis on the new media technologies and their profound impact on the current political processes worldwide.
The course will first provide an overview of the traditional theories of the media's role in democracy and then will go on to investigate the effects of the new communication technologies on the public sphere, media systems, democratic governance, and individual expression.
Global Perspectives on Sport, Culture & Society
Contemporary global sport is a unique phenomenon that simultaneously expresses universal elements of human culture and particular, historically informed aspects of national identity and social values around gender, race, ethnicity, and contemporary social issues. This course takes students on a comparative journey across Argentina, France, Italy, and Spain, using sport as a lens through which to view differences and similarities in each country's history, politics, and culture, in addition to the overarching social concerns of each society. Students will use a range of materials and sources to engage fundamental questions about the role of sport in the human experience, as well as its politicization, commercialization, professionalization, and mass-mediation. Students will learn how to critically analyze sport as a means to address current events in the world through comparisons of sport in the four countries.
Popular Culture of Ireland
This course will deconstruct the artistic and political "creation" of Irish stereotypes and how they affect, and are challenged by, contemporary Irish culture and identity, particularly in the wake of recent immigration. The course aims to give you the tools and theories necessary to explore culture and identity, which are traditionally aligned to academic fields such as anthropology, ethnography, sociology and geography, and particularly in the case of Ireland, literature. It is an aim of this course to give you an appreciation of researching culture and its disciplinary and interdisciplinary applications, as well as an understanding of how similar processes that create a national imagery apply to America.
International Marketing
In order to equip yourself with the essential knowledge necessary to meeting the challenges of global marketing, you will explore and analyze the many facets of developing effective marketing strategies, such as determining what environmental adjustments might be required; calculating how a company should go "international"; adapting to the economic dynamics of international business; evaluating the foreign political, legal, and environmental impact on company products and services; and gauging consumer behavior in emerging markets.
Environmental Ethics: Humans, Culture & Sustainability
The aim of this course is to explore the ethical challenges involved in the creation and maintenance of sustainable societies. In particular, we will ask what exactly it is that we should seek to sustain, why, how, and who or what should do so. We’ll consider the sustainability of current political, business, and cultural practices, as well as individual lifestyles.
You will explore the philosophical foundations of a plausible environmental ethic that may reconcile human responsibilities toward non-human nature and the future to our ongoing quest for meaning in a globalized, highly interconnected, unprecedentedly populated, rapidly urbanizing, ecologically deteriorating world. You’ll examine the challenges that understanding and living up to these responsibilities pose to our psychology and our ethical and political systems.
Keep August 1 marked on your calendar to apply for these highly engaging, global-minded virtual courses for Fall 2020! Learn more and apply here.