Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Global Liberal Arts*
Mission
The Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Global Liberal Arts (GLA) is an interdisciplinary program that offers students the knowledge, critical perspectives, and intellectual practices they need to engage ethically with the most pressing global challenges of our time. Centered on human and social values, and focused on critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and the ability to view ideas from multiple perspectives, the program brings together the humanities, social sciences, and science to give students the skills that the quickly changing global market demands and values most today. Students learn not only how society works but also how to engage and intervene with innovative solutions for a sustainable future. Given its commitment to equity and social justice, the program adopts a critical stance towards disciplinary knowledge and knowledge-making. The program is one of a few but quickly growing number of liberal arts programs based on the traditional American model in Europe that emphasize interdisciplinarity as a central feature of contemporary, timely, and relevant modern pedagogy. Located in Pafos, Cyprus, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, the program adopts a place-based approach that is grounded in Cyprus, even as it nurtures students, faculty, and staff to cultivate broad connections and to study movements and exchanges across cultures, geographical boundaries, and fields of knowledge.
Learning Outcomes
Students who complete the BA in GLA program will be able to:
- Demonstrate broad cultural knowledge focused on big questions, significant historical texts, and current critiques of humanistic knowledge.
- Develop a level of critical thinking, reading, and analysis that will support advanced academic study and lifelong learning.
- Communicate information and ideas to academic audiences and to the public orally, in writing, and through images, using different media.
- Demonstrate a sense of personal and social responsibility at local and global levels.
These learning outcomes align with the European Qualifications Framework.
Program Requirements
For successful completion of the BA in GLA degree, students must complete all components of the program, which carry a total
of 240 ECTS over 8 terms (4 years). The program consists of:
• Compulsory Core GLA Courses
• Elective GLA Courses within the following concentrations:
o Texts, Contexts, and Concepts
o Space, Place, and Identity
o Science, Society, and the Environment
• General Education Courses
*BA in Global Liberal Arts is in the final stages of approval and scheduled to launch in fall 2026.
Sample Core Courses
GLAS 100 – Introduction to Global Liberal Arts
The course will orient students towards the liberal arts philosophy and practices and encourage them to reflect on their personal aims for their university education. The course capitalizes on the university’s location in Pafos. Students will create a digital portfolio that they will continue to develop throughout their four-year undergraduate experience.
GLAS 101 – Great Texts Revisited I
This core foundational course offers students a broad introduction to cultural knowledge while strongly emphasizing practices of observation, reading, discussion, reflection, and inquiry. A primary aim of the course is to engage in close reading, looking, and critical engagement with the texts.
GLAS 200 – Global Liberal Arts Research I
This course provides a guided, in-depth introduction to academic research in a discipline or interdisciplinary subject in the professor’s area of expertise. It is the first of a two-course sequence. The first semester is dedicated to developing the research project, discussing research methods, and writing a proposal.
GLAS 302 – Digital Culture: Introduction to Digital Humanities
This course covers elements of digital culture and emergent means of analysis in the humanities. Approach will vary from term to term, but might include digital storytelling, text mining, augmented reality, electronic literature, spatial analysis or new media.
Sample Elective Courses
Texts, Contexts, and Concepts Concentration
GLAS 215 – Rhetorical Genre in Theory and Practice
Genre is core concept for understanding the interplay between texts and contexts in any medium. This course offers students a theoretical basis for exploring how texts participate in and are shaped by the contexts in which they are used. Genres play an important role in constructing institutions, disciplines, and social interactions, and the forms genres take are shaped by these roles. The course focuses on introducing students to rhetorical genre theory, which aims to understand the interplay between genres and contexts: what kind of work a text does, what ideologies it embodies, and what social relationships it engenders.
GLAS 221 – Copyright Culture
The aim of this course is to explore questions related to authorship, originality, and textual ownership through theoretical, historical, and practical perspectives, including the many issues related to intellectual property and copyright that have accompanied emerging technologies.
GLAS 230 – Seminar in Art, Power, and Society
This course uncovers the ways in which power, ideology, hegemony and legitimacy circulate through contemporary art institutions, like museums and cultural spaces, the processes of the making of art and the experience of encountering art in diverse sites.
Space, Place, and Identity Concentration
GLAS 250 – Space, Place, and Identity
How do the spaces we inhabit shape who we are and how we perceive the world? In this course, we will see how scholars, authors, filmmakers, and artists have grappled with this question. Taking a cross-cultural and cross-historical view, we will explore the intricate relationships between place, space, and identity, especially in the Mediterranean and Middle East. This course draws on an interdisciplinary framework that will introduce students to key theories and texts from critical geography, anthropology, sociology, media studies, and literature to understand how physical and imagined spaces shape notions of identity, belonging, and citizenship. The course will examine topics such as the significance of place to worldmaking, the politics of space, the impact of globalization, and the role of memory in constructing place-based identities.
SOAN 227 – Cultural Boundaries and Identities
This course is an introduction to the cross-cultural, transhistorical study of identity as an organizing, explanatory concept. The first part of the course will revisit the history of identity studies, including the emergence of the nation-state and the anthropological concept of ethnicity. In the process, we will consider the usefulness of different perspectives on identities and their boundaries. The second part of the course will consider how gender, class and racial identity components interact with ethnic and national ones. Ultimately, we will grapple with the related concept of subjectivity to consider how it differs from identity and helps us to understand people living in contexts of shifting boundaries and group settings created by and for globalization, migration, and transnational institutions.
AROL 291 – Mobility, Migration, and Diaspora
This course is intended as an introduction to this huge and expanding subject of study. As the subject is so large, the coverage of the subject will not be comprehensive. Instead, the course will provide students with a flavor. The course will take the form of small group work and debate, including individual presentations. The course will explore the theoretical frameworks of migration and mobility, and how these have changed. It seeks to broaden knowledge of the subject through case studies and will show how similar bodies of data can be differently interpreted, according to contrasting theoretical viewpoints and different data in some cases. After a brief look at contemporary positions the course will examine some of the debates currently influencing archaeology and history. Subjects covered will range from prehistoric archaeology to the use of paleogenetics to history and recorded historical examples of migration. After introducing each theme example case studies will be shown to show how movement and migration can come in a myriad of ways and have a myriad of effects.
Science, Society, and the Environment Concentration
CHEM 303 – Brief Survey of Organic Chemistry
The primary purpose of course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of organic chemistry concepts and their applications in real-world contexts. The course emphasizes the relevance of organic chemistry in daily life, particularly in fields related to health and agriculture.
GLAS 271 – History of Science
The course offers a broad overview cover key events in the history of science as well as key methodological innovations in the historiography of science. It will consider how the history of science has responded to its encounters with other fields, including philosophy, sociology, economics, and anthropology.
GLAS 272 – Science, Technology, and Society
This course considers the ethical implications of technologies and scientific findings that are profoundly influencing our personal lives and our societies.
PHYS 200 – Introduction to Astronomy
This is a basic Astronomy course that introduces students to the subject starting by a brief history on old astronomy and continues throughout the latest discoveries in the field. The course strongly emphasizes the scientific methods as fundamental tools of understanding the physical laws that govern our universe. Astronomy is one of the oldest science mankind has dabbled with, it reflects in a sense the struggle of human being to understand and gain knowledge of its surrounding. We will make a “journey” in this course from the Earth to the solar system with its central star our Sun, to the stars to arrive at understanding the basic structure of our galaxy the so called “Milky Way.”
