Global Experience Faculty

Every year, several SFS faculty members, our Global Experience champions, make the extra effort to design courses and programs that allow their students to engage in deeper global topics, cultures, or explorations of challenges.

Faculty develop:

• • Centennial Labs – SFS classes built around a real world issue, idea, problem, or challenge. They are both cross-curricular and experiential at the core. Students work with one or more professors and partners on location to develop insights into the understanding of, or solution to, an applied problem. Outputs have ranged from awareness building through Congressional hearings to the creation of alternative travel guides.  Travel typically takes place during Spring Break or at the end of the Spring term. Developmental time is 12-18 months, depending on the complexity of the program model and logistical partnerships.
  • Course-embedded travel SFS classes that concentrate on a country, place, or regional topic and use travel to provide insights not readily available in the classroom. The travel component usually takes place at the end of the term. These courses often require financial access to a source of external funding.  
  • Alternative Spring Breaks are programs abroad that may or may not carry academic credit. They are offered to students at cost and can be designed for undergraduates, graduates or both. Planning assistance comes from our office, but departments typically provide logistical support and financial responsibility. Developmental time is usually 12 months.
  • Faculty-led summer courses, developed in cooperation with the Office of Global Education, Georgetown’s study abroad support central unit, allow faculty to teach and lead an entire experiential course abroad. The classes and programs are offered to undergraduates at the cost of tuition and program fees. Developmental time is usually 18 months.

• • Research projects and career-enhancing opportunities, based on faculty research or engagements abroad, undergraduate or graduate students can often be supported to join faculty in projects, conferences, and unique research opportunities. Departmental support and the case-by-case approval of the Vice Dean for Undergraduate Studies are required.

If you are interested in becoming a Global Experience champion and developing any experiential courses and programs domestically or abroad, please take the first step and consult with Lucie Zacharova, Global Experience Director, in ICC 301-x Dean’s office or send an email to sfsglobalexperiece@georgetown.edu. 

All ideas are welcome and fully considered and will lead to consideration by the Dean’s office. The Vice Dean for Undergraduate Studies and the GE Director can support you before submitting a proposal for Spring programs 14 months ahead, in early January. Discuss ideas, program’s model, finances, and needs two years before execution.

Designing Global Experiences is highly rewarding yet demanding work extended by the following SFS faculty who invest extraordinary time and efforts. They make these special classes and experiential transformative academic experiences happen. No matter the program location, they genuinely support internationally engaged and responsible, globally-oriented learning. We call them SFS Global Experience faculty champions and they support students through cross-cultural journeys that lead to meaningful engagement in class topics on an international level. SFS student feedback and testimonials, such as Audrey’s, Cecilia’s, and Clark’s, best share how much impact they create!

Marc Busch 

GBUS 4970 Dispute Settlement – Washington DC Centennial Lab

Marc Busch is the Karl F. Landegger Professor of International Business Diplomacy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is an expert on international trade policy and law. He has addressed a wide range of governments and international institutions, including the Advisory Centre on WTO Law, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the World Bank, and the United Nations. He has testified before the US International Trade Commission on the TRIPS Waiver at the WTO, before the US Congress on Airbus-Boeing litigation, before the Canadian Senate on softwood lumber litigation, and before a NAFTA 2022 panel on best practices in dispute settlement.

Katherine Chandler

STIA 4935 & 4936 Public Interest Technology – Senegal Centennial Lab

Katherine Chandler’s research examines the intersection of technology, media, and politics through a range of scales and forms. Her first monograph, Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare, studies unmanned aircraft from 1936 – 1992. She asks how life and death are adjudicated through conditions organized as if control were ”unmanned.” Her most recent work studies how socio-politics are entangled with everyday media and technologies. This includes PowerPoint, email, and drone aircraft deployed for commercial, humanitarian, and medical purposes. 

Father Patrick Desbois

JCIV 3100 & 3101 Holocaust Forensics – Romania Centennial Lab

Father Patrick Desbois is the president of Yahad-In Unum and has devoted his life to confronting anti-Semitism and furthering Catholic-Jewish understanding. His research has dramatically expanded the scope of understanding concerning the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. His book, The Holocaust by Bullets, documents those findings. Father Desbois is the director of the Episcopal Committee for Relations with Judaism, serves as a consultant to the Vatican, and was a personal aide to the late Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Humanitarian Award of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, awarded Father Desbois the Medal of Valor.

Rochelle Davis

ARST 4478 & 4479 Cultural Heritage in the Arab World – Egypt Centennial Lab

Rochelle Davis’s teaching interests include Arab society and culture; cultural heritage and conflict; refugees, migrants and immigrants in and out of the Arab World; and war and conflict. She uses different genres of texts and other forms of media in her classroom to expose students to the wide range of material – both primary and secondary – about the Arab World. Her syllabi include ethnographies, autobiographies, scholarly books and articles from different disciplines, blogs, cartoons, films, novels, poetry, and media.

John Kraemer

African Studies Alternative Spring Break in Nairobi, Kenya

John Kraemer is an associate professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Health Management and Policy, and he is also affiliated with the university’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and African Studies Program. His work focuses on the intersection of empirical evidence and public health policy, and he mainly studies women and children’s health in rural populations in sub-Saharan Africa and road safety for vulnerable road users. He has taught undergraduate epidemiology and graduate quantitative methods. He also teaches a course on the intersection of democracy, rights, and public health policy.

Kristen Looney 

ASST 3325/GOV 3448 Taiwan: The Politics of Taiwan – Taiwan Centennial Lab

Kristen Looney is an associate professor of Asian Studies and Government and teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance. Dr. Looney has previously published her research in World Politics, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History, among other outlets. She is part of the Public Intellectuals Program (PIP) of the National Committee on US-China Relations (2023-2025) and is a former Wilson China Fellow (2022-2023). Her research has been supported by the Wilson Center, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Blakemore Foundation, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program.

Dale Murphy 

GBUS 4972 Start-Up Studio – Washington DC Centennial Lab

Dale Murphy teaches in the Landegger Program in International Business Diplomacy (IBD) at the Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS). He was the first University-wide Director of Entrepreneurial Programs, starting in 2007, for which he wrote and led a winning $3 million grant proposal to the Kauffman Foundation for Georgetown University. He pioneered entrepreneurship teaching within SFS, leading the Colligan-Quinlan Initiative on Entrepreneurship, and leads the SFS Entrepreneurship Initiative and annual Global Impact Pitch Competition (GIPC). His students have gone on to found startups ranging from a billion-dollar ‘unicorn’ to an award-winning anti-corruption NGO.

Kwame Edwin Otu

AFSP 2205 & 2207 Africa is People – Ghana Centennial Lab

Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, to their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora.

Lahra Smith

African Studies Alternative Spring Break in Nairobi, Kenya

Lahra Smith is a Political Scientist with a particular interest in African politics, migration and refugees, and citizenship and equality. She teaches courses on migration, women and politics and theory and policy in Africa. She was the CSJ Faculty Fellow for African Migration and is currently a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM). Prof. Smith has taught and conducted research in refugee camps in East and Southern Africa, and has ongoing research on civic education programs in Kenya, particularly focused on the role of teachers as active agents of citizen-creation.

Andrej Umansky

JCIV 3100 & 3101 Holocaust Forensics – Romania Centennial Lab

Andrej Umansky, the Center for Jewish Civilization’s Post-Doctoral Fellow, serves on the Board of Directors of Yahad in Unum, where he works to advance the mission through forensic investigation, academia, and community engagement. Dr. Umansky further advises, defends, and represents, as a Specialist lawyer for criminal law and Senior Associate of the law firm, individuals and companies in criminal law and administrative offenses in economic and international law areas.

Rajesh Veeraraghavan

STIA 4935 & 4936 Futures of Work – Senegal Centennial Lab 

COIL course with DAUST (Dakar American University of Science and Technology)

Rajesh Veeraraghavan is an Associate Professor of Science Technology and International Affairs (STIA) Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He works at the intersection of information technology, development, and governance, focusing on India. His research combines the design and study of technological solutions to development and governance problems. He is currently interested in understanding the role of information and technology in making governance systems more participatory.