20 Years of Stanford Global Studies

The Stanford Global Studies Division was founded in 2005 as the International and Comparative Area Studies Division (ICA), bringing together Stanford’s various international and area studies centers under one umbrella.

In 2010, the division started overseeing the Global Studies Internship Program. What began as a small, East Asia-focused initiative has expanded into a global network of opportunities. In summer 2025, the program sent 80 students representing 29 majors to internships in 26 cities worldwide—from Cape Town to Mumbai.

The International and Comparative Area Studies Division (ICA) was renamed Stanford Global Studies (SGS), reflecting a growing scope and aspirations for the future.

In 2014, the Center for Human Rights & International Justice joined SGS, bringing an interesting portfolio of projects, including the Virtual Tribunal project, an effort to compile a comprehensive database of war crimes tribunal records.

In 2015, SGS launched a global studies minor program. The minor is designed to give students a global view, through an introductory course, as well as in-depth interdisciplinary study provided by six of our centers and programs: African Studies, European Studies, Iranian Studies, Islamic Studies, Latin American Studies, and South Asian Studies.

In 2016, SGS launched a minor in human rights. Providing a structure to the diverse academic offerings related to human rights at Stanford, the new minor encourages students from any major to understand how human rights are interconnected across seemingly disparate disciplines.

In an effort to encourage new curricular pathways, SGS established a Course Innovation Award program to support courses that creatively engage students in learning about global issues. Since 2017, the program has funded more than 25 globally focused courses.

SGS moved from Encina Hall West to the first floor of Encina Commons. The relocation to the newly renovated and revitalized Encina Commons came as part of a larger effort to create a centrally located, academic hub on campus for international studies.

SGS introduced a Global Dialogues Series to foster fresh thinking on critical global issues and develop new approaches to grapple with the complexities of our interconnected and constantly changing world.

Since 2021, SGS has hosted more than 12 events that have tackled topics as diverse as global debt, water politics, the history of enslavement, and Indigenous data sovereignty.

In 2022, SGS was instrumental in establishing Stanford's Scholar Rescue Fund, which offers residencies to international scholars experiencing persecution or severe hardship in their home countries. This effort continues a tradition more than a century old, during which SGS has served as an academic home for many displaced scholars, enabling them to pursue their research and teaching within a safe, supportive community.

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Education designated four SGS centers as Title VI National Resource Centers, which are devoted to foreign languages and area studies. For the first time, SGS itself received a designation as an International NRC—affirming our role as a national leader in global education.

In an effort to foster the sharing of research across academic fields and national boundaries, SGS announced a Global Research Workshop program, to support workshops that explore interdisciplinary, transregional themes.

In fall 2025, we marked our 20-year milestone with a celebration featuring alumni from across our interdisciplinary degree programs—graduates whose international studies have taken them around the world and into diverse fields and careers.