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

Power of Language Week: A Week Around the World

by Oleksandra Volakova Power of Language Week is an annual event aimed to bring together multilingual students worldwide and help them share their cultural experiences with peers, staff, and faculty. This year, the second annual weeklong initiative took place from February 16 to February 23, successfully hosting 28 unique events, organized and led Wesleyan students…

Congratulations to our 2024 Critical Language Scholarship Finalists and Alternates!

The Fries Center for Global Studies is proud to announce that six Wesleyan students have been selected as Finalists, with one more student being selected as an alternate, for the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for the summer of 2024. This year’s cohort is made up by Eli Siegel-Bernstein ’25 and Mohammad Hasib ’24, who were…

Full-Scale War Anniversary: Why Continuing to Help Ukraine Matters

by Oleksandra Volakova On February 24, 2022, Ukraine shuddered with the bombing, shootings, crying, and screaming. A real war, usually practiced in history books and movies, was witnessed by civilians the hard way, with their habitat destroyed along with the dreams and hopes they held for the future. For the past two years, Ukraine has…
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