BCLA Global Immersion Courses

Immersion to: Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi, Ghana
Travel Dates: May 19-30, 2025
Class Time: Tuesday and Thursday 1:45-3:25
Professors: Cheryl Grills and Deanna Cooke
Prerequisite: Interview with Faculty
Flag: Engaged Learning (LENL)
Lab Fee: $3,915
Financial assistance available

Course Description: This course challenges students to critically analyze their current understanding of Africa and its people, their perception of the value of African culture and the relevance of the paradigm of Western psychology. Students will be exposed to indigenous African knowledge in philosophy, psychology, medicine, spirituality, and history. Students will use these frames to interrogate how Black people globally are portrayed (often negatively), how they are erased from the discourse in these disciplines, and how an African-centered perspective counters the long-standing and dominant narrative of Black inferiority. To accomplish this, the course focuses on three main themes: 1) a holistic African Worldview and understanding of psychology; 2) the history and ongoing consequences of the Trans-Atlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans; and 3) understanding indigenous African (Akan) culture and African and diasporan African cultural retentions. In regard to each of these, students will explore the connections between Ghana and African descended people across the Diaspora.

Trip Description: The trip to Ghana West Africa will engage students in Ghanaian contexts that will illustrate African philosophy, psychology, medicine, spirituality, and history. We will travel to 3 regions, starting in Accra we will visit local cultural sites and meet with scholars at the University of Ghana’s Philosophy and Sociology Departments. We will travel by bus to Kumasi where we will stay with traditional medical practitioner, Nana Abas, and learn about spirituality and traditional approaches to healing. We will then go to the sites where enslaved Africans were kept before being sent to the new world. This will be more than journey, but will be a pilgrimage.

Immersion to: Athens, Greece
Travel Dates: March 1-9, 2025
Class Time: Tuesday and Thursday 1:45-3:25
Professor: Christina Bogdanou
Core Attributes: Creative Experience (ECRE)
Lab Fee: $2,725
Financial assistance available

Course Description: A multi-disciplinary exploration of Modern Greek theater from its ancient origins to its contemporary reincarnations. Through a series of lectures, theater visits, and workshops with artists, students will engage with topics like the evolution of Greek theater as well as the creative process of writing, staging, and performing theater today.

Trip Description: During a week-long immersion workshop in Athens, Greece, the birthplace of drama, students will get acquainted with theatrical Athens and trace its rich history from past to present. Through a series of theater visits, lectures, backstage tours, and meetings with actors, directors and writers, students will discuss topics like creating theatre then and now, popular forms of theatre and everyday life as a source of inspiration.

Immersion to: Rome, Italy
Travel Dates: May 19-24, 2025
Class Time: Tuesday and Thursday 8:00-9:40
Professor: Fr. Cyril Hovorun
Core Attributes: Faith & Reason (INT)
Flag: Engaged Learning (LENL)
Lab Fee: $1,320
Financial assistance available

Course Description: This course examines various Eastern Christian traditions, including Byzantine (Chalcedonian), Oriental (non-Chalcedonian), Eastern Syriac (Nestorian), and Eastern Catholic (Uniate), focusing on their development in countries such as Greece, Russia, Syria, Ethiopia, and more. It offers a historical overview from Late Antiquity to the present, emphasizing the cultural contexts of these churches and their relationships with state and society. The course explores Eastern perspectives on theology, the Incarnation, cosmology, ecotheology, anthropology, ecclesiology, and the challenges of nationalism and recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine. Additionally, it highlights Eastern Christianity's spiritual practices, such as monasticism, the Jesus Prayer, and theosis, with stories of Eastern saints and a focus on ecumenism and Christian unity.

Trip Description: Rome around 700 was a “Byzantine” city, or, as Per Jonas Nordhage put it, “Constantinople on the Tiber.” The students will explore the early Christian monuments of the “eternal city” with a focus on its “Byzantine” layer. This will include visiting the following museums and churches: Musei Vaticani, Le Terme di Diocleziano, Crypta Balbi, Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Prassede, Santa Sabina, San Clemente, Santa Maria Antiqua, and Santa Maria in Cosmedin.

Immersion to: Tokyo, Japan
Travel Dates: March 1-8, 2025
Class Time: Tuesday and Thursday 1:45-3:25
Professor: Gene Park
Lab Fee: $3,390
Financial assistance available

Course Description: Over the course of more than a century and a half, Japan has gone through a dizzying series of political, economic and cultural transformations from an isolationist feudal regime to an imperial power to a pacific economic giant to a nation facing growing domestic and international challenges. This course will delve into these transformations focusing particularly on the period since World War II to understand the origins and development of Japan’s modern political and economic institutions. Despite rapid economic growth and relative political stability for much of this period, Japan now confronts a new set of challenges that may be setting the stage for yet a new transformation. We will explore some of these challenges such as: 1) changing demographics; 2) an extended period of economic stagnation; 3) debates over national identity as the country debates its immigration policy; and 4) a rapidly changing international environment with the rise of China as an economic and military powerhouse.

Trip Description: Please note that the course includes a required trip during Spring Break to Japan. The trip will be from March 1 to March 8, 2025. During this time, we will tour important historical and cultural sights, visit key political institutions, and engage with students in Japan.

Immersion to: Lublin and Warsaw, Poland
Travel Dates: February 28-March 8, 2025
Class Time: Tuesday and Thursday 9:55-11:35
Professor: Margarete Feinstein
Prerequisites: Consent of Instructor
Core Attributes: Interdisciplinary Connect (IINC)
Lab Fee: $2,215
Financial assistance available

Course Description: This class will examine how historians and psychologists explain the phenomenon of genocide in the modern world. Key to these interpretations are the role of power and privilege in creating the conditions for genocide, in shaping the experiences and actions of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, and in fostering denial or reconciliation. In this global immersion course, we will examine the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. There will be a special focus on the Holocaust in Poland, paying attention to the impact on bystanders of witnessing genocide and on the conditions necessary for reconciliation.

Trip Description: We will travel to Lublin for 5 nights, partnering with students at the Catholic University on a project about life under German occupation and postwar Catholic-Jewish dialogue. Then, we will spend 2 nights in Warsaw, visiting the Warsaw ghetto, the Polin Museum, and the Old Town.

Immersion to: London, Ely, and Canterbury, United Kingdom
Travel Dates: March 2-8, 2025
Class Time: Monday and Wednesday 1:45-3:25 (01), Monday and Wednesday 3:40-5:20 (02)
Professor: Anna Harrison
Prerequisites: A willingness to work hard!
Core Attributes: Faith and Reason (INT)
Lab Fee: $1,680
Financial assistance available

Course Description: This course focuses on topics of major religious significance to people living in late medieval western Europe. We consider varieties of ways of living religiously (monastic, knightly, clerical, for example). We examine medieval notions of: God; the human being--body and soul; salvation; rituals and devotional practices (such as communal prayer, relic cult, eucharist, and pilgrimage); the geography of the afterlife and the relationship between the living and the dead. We proceed through a close reading of medieval texts in a variety of genres, written by women and men (Hildegard of Bingen, Thomas Aquinas), including visionary literature, commentaries on scripture, theological treatises, prayers, Lives of saints, and miracle collections. We study devotional objects and architecture.

Trip Description: During spring break, we travel to England to visit sites relevant to our study. These include the cathedrals in Canterbury and in Ely. An optional “pilgrims’ walk” retraces an eight-mile portion of the popular medieval pilgrimage route from London to Canterbury, site of the relics of Thomas of Canterbury, where miracles of healing were sought. This trip is a required part of the class. Expect a mix of fun and hard work, with an intense schedule and written work to be completed on site and on after returning to LMU.