Welcome to the Fries Center for Global Studies, Wesleyan’s hub for intercultural and multilingual engagement. Building on the decades of experience at Wesleyan with education abroad, international studies, and language education, the Fries Center was founded in 2015. In 2022, President Michael Roth issued a Presidential Statement on Internationalization that makes explicit what we mean by “internationalization” and sets forth a range of goals for the next five years. The Fries Center’s many inter-related functions and activities can be accessed via our main menu. We also maintain an active blog featuring activities and opportunities (see below) and send out a newsletter every other week with highlights from the blog. Subscribe to the Wes and the World Newsletter here.

Wesleyan and the World

How Is It Being a Freshman at Wes? International Student Perspectives

by Oleksandra Volakova Summer break is around the corner, finally bringing warm weather and plenty of pastime. For international students, it is also the time to finally meet with faraway family and friends and observe how their hometown changed over the year of their absence. Over a year, students were getting used to a new…

Finding Community in Kenya

by Luke Chávez Sun has given way to gray clouds as I peer over the roof of a Land Cruiser. What seems like endless herds of zebra and cape buffalo graze right in front of me, framed by the epic plains and acacia trees of Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya. The other students in…

Watson Fellow Livia Cox ’22 Studies Pain

by Miki Lynch What is pain? Why do we experience pain? Is pain perceived the same way across different cultures? To answer these questions one might ask Livia Cox ‘22, a Thomas J. Watson awardee who spent her fellowship year studying the connection between cultural, political, and social definitions of pain. The Watson fellowship is…
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