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Our vision is that every Honors scholar should be able to study for a semester abroad or go on a faculty-led international course at least once. We live in a global community; recognizing this and being part of that community are fundamental first steps to full engagement.
We understand the difficulty and challenges that a study abroad program can present to a student. To support students with the financial challenge, Study Abroad scholarships are available from the Honors College and other entities on campus.
J-term and summer courses are fantastic opportunities to study abroad between the fall and spring semesters so you do not fall behind in your major coursework.
For course descriptions of Honors Faculty-Led Study Abroad courses and to apply, visit the UWYO Abroad portal and search for the course title: https://uwyo-sa.terradotta.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Programs.SimpleSearch.
For more information about Education Abroad, visit their website: https://www.uwyo.edu/uwyoabroad/index.html.
For additional questions about these courses, please contact the instructor of the class you are curious about.
Art Fairs and Contemporary Art: Venice and Kassel
Application Deadline: December 15th
Estimated cost: $3800 PLUS airfare, most meals, and additional excursions
Instructor: Tracey Eckersley
teckersl@uwyo.edu
For sixteen days, we will examine artworks by the world’s most important up-and-coming and established artists.
First, we will visit the floating city of Venice and explore the Biennale, nicknamed the “Olympics of art.” A welcome dinner and tour of Venice and St. Mark’s Basilica is included, and optional trips to a Murano glass-blowing workshop, the Roman Christian mosaics at Ravenna, and a classical concert are available. You will also have opportunities to enjoy the sights and tastes (gelato!) of Venice on your own.
Then we will travel to Kassel and investigate documenta, originally developed to reintroduce contemporary art to Germany after Hitler’s censorship. A tour of the city is included. You will also have opportunities to enjoy the sights and tastes (strudel!) of this city on your own.
CIEL Middle East: Experiential Learning and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Application Deadline: December 15th
Estimated cost: $4750*
Instructor: Nevin Aiken
naiken@uwyo.edu
Program Dates: July 28 – August 16 (Summer 2022)
The Center for International Experiential Learning (CIEL) is a premier non-profit educational travel provider that draws on over a decade of proven programmatic and academic excellence in safely guiding students on experiential learning opportunities through immersive educational travel in conflict-affected regions led by internationally recognized scholars in partnership with local actors and a carefully designed and rigorous program of pre-travel education.
Participants from UW in CIEL’s Middle East program will join other students from universities across the US and UK in immersive educational travel to receive on-the-ground exposure to the people, politics and realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as they transit between the difficult and contested geographies of Jordan, Israel and the West Bank. As a unique part of their experiential learning program, students will actively engage with politicians, community leaders, non-governmental organizations, faith leaders, academic experts and victims/survivors from all sides impacted by the conflict to hear a comprehensive view of the divergent perspectives, narratives and human stories of people living in the region. As a result of their travel experience in the Middle East, students will return to campus better educated and more nuanced in their thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and empowered with the knowledge and transferable skills needed to emerge as leaders in addressing issues of division and polarization surrounding complex global problems and in their own local contexts.
*Program fee includes all in-country transportation, accommodations, meal and all program related excursions and entry fees. Does not include flights to/from region, UW tuition/fees for up to 6 variable upper-division credit hours, $325 study abroad fee or any required vaccinations.
Modern Japanese Society and Culture
Instructor: Noah Miles
Application Deadline: Feburary 1, 2022
Estimated cost: $3500
Instructor: Noah Miles
nmiles1@uwyo.edu
Honors travel to Japan is a course designed to expose students to the widest range of Japanese experience. Museums in Japan are spectacular, food is of the highest quality, kindness and respect are typical.
Modern living in Tokyo- How the modern survives tradition: contemporary and historic art, shrines, fashion, food and a bullet train. Hotel in Tokyo
Buddhist temple in Kyoto- How the ancient survives the modern- shrines and temples, meditation, tourists, tofu, castles, gardens, dance, a bamboo forest. Stay in Shunkoin Buddhist temple.
Hiroshima - the terror and the healing. How can anyone deal with it or not deal with it? Peace Park Museum, parks, Genpaku Dome. Sleep on Miyajima, hotel.
Miyajima- 3000 year old shrine on a little island outside Hiroshima- catharsis and oysters.
Naoshima- Hidden art treasures- four museums, beautiful scenery, the ocean. Hostel
Himeji/Mount Fuji hot spring- one or the other, but definitely one hot spring hotel in the tranquility and Kaiseki ryori!
Travel from Denver to Tokyo, some food, all accommodations, all travel within the Japan, entrance fees. Does not include: tuitions, study abroad fees, spending money, most food.
Shakespeare in England and Italy
Instructors: Peter Parolin and Leigh Selting
parolin@uwyo.edu; selting@uwyo.edu
Application Deadlines:
December 15th
Estimated cost: $3700*
Dates of class: May 15, 2022 - June 5, 2022
Shakespeare in England and Italy will give you a great introduction to the plays of William Shakespeare as texts and ongoing cultural milestones. The class also introduces you to the plays in performance – we attend seven or eight performances at major theatres like the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe as well as smaller and regional venues to explore the myriad ways that contemporary artists bring Shakespeare’s plays to vibrant life. Finally, the course exposes you to amazing places in England and Italy, especially the great cities where we will stay and the social and artistic institutions that characterize them. Shakespeare set plays in Italian cities as a way of investigating cultural difference. There is a wonderful synergy between our own experience as visitors to England and Italy and Shakespeare’s own repeated exploration of cultural encounters across difference.
This class welcomes students from all disciplines. We study Shakespeare both as text on the page and as plays staged three-dimensionally in physical space. We consider set, costume design, music, and lighting. We also discuss themes of the plays, which touch on all fields of thought -- psychology, politics, gender, race, sexuality, history, mythology, economics, philosophy, and more.
The tentative travel dates for the class are Sunday, May 15 - Sunday June 5, 2022 (departing from and returning to Denver International Airport). As well, there will be a few weekend dates in April and early May when the class will meet for required sessions.
The class will travel first to England, where we will spend about four days in Stratford-Upon-Avon, and eight days in London. There may be day trips to sites outside of London. We will then fly to Italy, where we will be based for three days in Vicenza and four days in Venice. In Italy, there will be day trips to Padua and Verona.
*Includes airfare, in-country transportation, accommodations, theatre tickets, excursions, some meals. Does not include UW tuition/fees, $325 study abroad fee, personal spending money.
UW in Scotland: Stealing Culture
The Intersection of Criminal Law and Museums
Instructors: Nicole Crawford and Darrell Jackson
nicole.crawford@uwyo.edu; darrell.jackson@uwyo.edu
Application Deadline: October 22
Estimated Cost: $3,500*
In one five-minute sequence, the blockbuster Marvel movie Black Panther raises issues central to the modern museum world, including cultural appropriation and repatriation, the racial composition of museum staffs, and lingering stereotypes regarding visitors of color. Some of these concerns have been in the public consciousness since the 1980s, when the Greek government began campaigning forcefully — and so far unsuccessfully — for the British Museum to repatriate the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles, a group of classical sculptures removed from the Parthenon. But these issues have a fresh relevance today as society increasingly shifts away from a Eurocentric point of view and gains a renewed appreciation for the indigenous culture of formerly colonized nations.
By spending time with international experts and visiting relevant locations in Scotland, England, and Greece, students will analyze all the different forms of theft that directly impact museums: cultural, fraudulent, and physical. By using the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles as the primary case study, this interdisciplinary class introduces students to the laws governing, and the circumstances behind, topics regarding visual arts as cultural goods, international theft and smuggling of works of art, forgery, questions of ownership, architectural preservation, and related matter.
*$3,500 covers all accommodations, entrance fees to museums and historic sites, some excursions, in-country transportation (including public transportation) and some meals.
Not included in cost: Airfare from and to United States, most meals, incidental expenses, COVID testing to enter U.K. if required, cost of passport if you need one. Tuition and fees, $325 in study abroad fees (which includes international insurance).
The Quest for King Arthur: Legend, Heritage and Tourism
Application Deadline: Feb 1, 2022
Estimated cost: $4175*
Instructors: Susan Aronstein, Kent Drummond
aronstei@uwyo.edu; drummond@uwyo.edu
We all know (or think we know) the story of Arthur and his knights: the sword in the stone, Camelot, the Round Table, might for right. In most cases, we are not sure how we know it. We just do. But take a look around you. Excalibur Hotel, Round Table Pizza, A Connecticut Rabbit in King Arthur’s Court, Camelot 3000, Cursed, Spamalot—from Las Vegas to Broadway, television to PlayStation, restaurants to bookstores—the Arthurian legend permeates modern culture, selling us everything from video games and pizzas to hotels and tourist sites.
And while Arthur is everywhere, the best place to study him is Britain, his legendary birthplace, where the once and future king remains one of the country’s most marketable brands.
In this class, we will examine the intersection of Arthurian tales, medievalism, and heritage tourism, beginning in Laramie, with a two-day intensive introduction to Arthurian Legend and Heritage tourism, and then traveling to our home-base in Exeter. Our classroom will here and on the road—Winchester, Stonehenge, Tintagel, Glastonbury, and London. As we travel, we will be thinking tourists: observing, taking notes, analyzing, chatting along the way, and discussing the sites in the context of course readings. In addition to scheduled trips, you will be given time to extend your study of heritage tourism by striking out on your own, with classmates, or with one of us on day trips--to Bath for a Jane Austen tour, London to see Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, or Bristol to sail with pirates.
*Cost includes lodging and breakfast--12 nights in Exeter, 1 in Tintagel, 2 in London, airport transfers and travel within the UK, all excursions, admissions, and theater tickets, and a 4 day flex Brit Rail pass for additional exploration.
Puritanism: History and Myth
Application Deadline: February 15, 2022
Estimated cost: $4615
Instructor: Tammy Heise
theise2@uwyo.edurudim@uwyo.edu
Puritanism was never just a national phenomenon of early modern England. From its beginning, this religious and political movement had an international scope through its universalizing vision for the creation of the ideal Christian society. This class will examine how Puritans influenced art and architecture, literature and science, music and sports, and much more as they sought to enact their revolutionary religious agenda through political activism and even rebellion to overthrow (temporarily) the monarchy in England. It also will examine the profound shifts that occurred as religious dissenters became political rulers through Puritan settlement in New England. In particular, we will consider how Puritans sought to resolve their conflicting impulses toward “soul liberty” and spiritual equality with their insistence on rigid social hierarchies and violent expressions of religious intolerance.
Controversies over religious and political authority — like the Pequot War and Salem Witch Trials — had significant implications for constructions of race and gender and in early American and their effects still matter.
Examining such controversies also helps to reveal reasons for the persistent misunderstanding of Puritans as the originators of religious freedom and the role this misunderstanding plays in modern American culture. In many ways, to be an American today is to grapple with Puritan history and its mythic paradigms for understanding American national identity. Contemporary attempts to center American history on the Puritan settlement of New England and on Puritan influence in the development of U.S. political and legal structures also represent powerful attempts to preserve Protestant religion at the center of American culture. Such American mythologies of Puritanism as the source of American national identity flatten the messy contours of Puritan history in an attempt to authorize new and sometimes theocratic religious visions for American society. This class also will explore counter-narratives to the Puritan origin myth in America and what they reveal about competing visions of American national identity.
Travel dates are May 15-26, 2022 to New England (Boston, Plymouth and Salem, Massachusetts) and England (including London, Canterbury, Cambridge, Salisbury, Bath, and Stonehenge).
*These are courses that are currently in exploratory stages.
Political Revolucion, Cultural Evolucion: Study Abroad in Paris, Barcelona, and Ronda
Instructors: Lori Howe and Zach Taylor
lhowe@uwyo.edu; ztaylor1@uwyo.edu
The A&S Core Global aspect of the course compares ancient and modern geopolitical elements of Spain to those of the U.S., while the Human Culture aspect explores ancient and modern art, dance, music, food, architecture, and religions. Political revolution influences cultural evolution, and vice versa; this joint exploration illuminates the complex, ancient threads, woven together over millennia, depicting the vibrant nation of España.
After three splendid days in Paris, we will explore exciting, urban Barcelona before then moving south to the historic, iconic pueblos blancos, or white mountain towns, of Andalucía. We will be headquartered in the walled city of Ronda, famed for its ancient architecture, culture, food, and museums.
Buddhism in Thailand
Application Deadline: TBA
Estimated cost: $2795-2995
Instructor: Kate Hartmann
Catherine.Hartmann@uwyo.edu
Some bad news: life is stressful, unpredictable, and full of pain and suffering. It's true now and it was true in the 5th Century BCE when the Buddha lived. Some good news: the Buddha claimed to have discovered a path by which people could escape this pervasive suffering. In the process, he planted the seeds for a religious tradition that has been influential across Asia and, more recently, the modern West.
In this course, we will explore the diverse ideals, practices, and traditions of Buddhism while exploring the ways Buddhism is lived and practiced in Thailand. We will explore key ideas from the Buddhist tradition about impermanence, desire, and the nature of the self, and ask how these ideas were taken up and reimagined as Buddhism developed.
The course has two primary goals. First: to understand how, in various times, places, and cultural contexts, the Buddhist tradition diagnosed the origins of human suffering, imagined the goal of freedom from suffering, and proposed a path to such freedom. Second: to understand the relationship between Buddhist scriptural traditions and Buddhism as experienced in everyday life by people in Thailand. What do Buddhists seem to be doing? How does Buddhism play a role in their daily lives? How do we think that this daily practice relates (or does not relate) to scriptural sources?
We will explore these questions in Thailand as we visit gorgeous temples, shop at the floating market in Bangkok, relax on the beaches of Pattaya, volunteer at Elephant Nature Park, eat delicious Thai food, and much more!
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