As colleges and universities in North America increasingly identify "internationalization" as a key component of the institution’s mission and strategic plans, faculty and administrators are charged with finding innovative and cost-effective approaches to meet those goals. This volume provides an overview and concrete examples of globally-networked learning environments across the humanities from the perspective of all of their stakeholders: teachers, instructional designers, administrators and students. By addressing logistical, technical, pedagogical and intercultural aspects of globally-networked teaching, this volume offers a unique perspective on this form of curricular innovation through internationalization. It speaks directly to the ways in which new technologies and pedagogies can promote humanities-based learning for the future and with it the broader essential skills of intercultural sensitivity, communication and collaboration, and critical thinking.

Epistolary Entanglements in Film, Media and the Visual Arts. Eds. Teri Higgins and Catherine Fowler. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 259-273.

This collection departs from the observation that online forms of communication—the email, blog, text message, tweet—are actually haunted by old epistolary forms: the letter and the diary. By examining the omnipresence of writing across a variety of media, the collection adds the category of Epistolary Screens to genres of self-expression, both literary (letters, diaries, auto-biographies) and screenic (romance dramas, intercultural cinema, essay films, artists’ videos and online media). The category Epistolary encapsulates an increasingly paradoxical relation between writing and the self: first, it describes selves that are written in graphic detail via letters, diaries, blogs, texts, emails and tweets; second, it acknowledges that absence complicates communication, bringing people together in an entangled rather than ordered way. The collection concerns itself with the changing visual/textual texture of screen media and examines what is at stake for our understanding of self-expression when it takes Epistolary forms.

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Sine 2015, every incarnation of FMST 025 Television Studies and FMST 038 Reality TV has produced an original television episode (a  pilot, a lost episode or a parody/remediation of an existing show). Red carpet premieres are held in early May. In 2015, the class created a Swarthmore version of the MTV show The Real World. In 2016, students opted to update Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003-2007). In 2018, the pilot episode was modeled after romance-themed reality television. In 2023, a mockumentary of life on our college campus became real-er through social media tags that made it onto the Instagram of the admissions office . Currently, a murder mystery is in production.

This class, co-developed and executed with a Suny COIL grant by Profs. Sunka Simon (German/FMST), Carina Yervasi (French/FMST) and Mikelle Antoine (African History at Ashesi), was taught synchronously via Skype between Swarthmore College in PA (USA) and Ashesi University in Akkra (Ghana) for two hours each week. The two classes met asynchronously for another two hours and collaborated in shared group assignments via email and discussion forums on Moodle. 

Based on the class, Simon and Yervasi co-authored “Re-Envisioning Diasporas in the Globally Connected Classroom.” Globally Networked Teaching in the Humanities: Theories and Practices.  Eds. Alexandra Schultheis-Moore and Sunka Simon. London/NY:  Routledge Press, 2015. 136-155.