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Toledo, Spain, on a rare sunny day. My wife, who is an art major, was excited to see some of El Greco's famous paintings here. We traveled from city to city each day, beginning on the west coast at the Spain/France border. We crisscrossed northern Spain, drove halfway through Portugal, then back into to Spain heading toward Madrid. |
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—Jean-Baptiste Prevot, French studies master's candidate, from Lyon, France |
The Center for the Study of Europe aims to become a leading interdisciplinary
community of scholars and students focused on Europe. Through sponsorship
of workshops, speakers, research, study abroad, community outreach,
and novel courses with strong European content, CSE also provides
training for BYU students, regional teachers and students at all
education levels, businesses, media, and the general public.
More
info
View our brochure,
now available for teachers to distribute to their students. For
copies of the brochure contact us at (801) 422-6277 or e-mail
your request.
Who We Are
During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, BYU closed its doors
to allow students and faculty to use their language skills and cultural
experience to serve as interpreters and hosts for dignitaries, press,
athletes, and coaches from Europe and other regions. Hundreds of students
and faculty volunteered, speaking every language represented by European
Olympic athletes (70 percent of BYU students speak a second language).
Few institutions are as well situated as BYU to prepare students to understand
and nurture ties with Europe. The European experience and language skills
of students and faculty make the campus home to a remarkably sophisticated
and rich discussion about European topics.
Objectives
The Center for the Study of Europe (CSE) aims to become a leading interdisciplinary
community of scholars and students working on Europe. Through its sponsorship
of workshops, speakers, research, study abroad, community outreach, and
novel courses with strong European content, CSE also provides training
for all BYU students, regional teachers, and students at all education
levels, and businesses, the media, and the general public.
Among the many activities to be achieved by NRC funding, CSE has established
five main objectives:
1. Expand language offerings to accommodate growing demand
2. Reinforce non-language offerings in European studies
3. Support scholarly inquiry
4. Develop new linkages and internship opportunities
5. Extend the breadth and depth of outreach efforts
Students
BYU is unique in that around 10,000 of our students speak a European language
other than English with advanced-plus fluency. Europe is a pillar of the
BYU curriculum with upwards of 150 faculty teaching almost 1,000 courses
that have substantially or exclusively European content. Roughly half
of these courses are language courses. Enrollments in these classes—most
of which are offered in multiple sections each year—reached almost
45,000 on the West European side alone during the most recent academic
year. Courses on Russia and Eastern Europe raised enrollment substantially
higher, as BYU continues to host the nation's largest undergraduate Russian
department.
Faculty
Of the faculty in question, over 80 percent speak a foreign language with
at least an intermediate fluency, while 29 percent speak two or more and
93 percent have spent at least one year in Europe. This unique set of
skills and experience has prepared CSE faculty to direct the eleven permanent
European study abroad programs and other internship/research programs
that offer 106 courses with 1,586 enrollments during the 2001–02
academic year, among the very highest in the nation. CSE also offers a
Summer Language Institute in six European languages.
Outreach
BYU's various outreach programs have a remarkable scope. The
Lee Library's Western European Collection contains over one million holdings
in over twenty Western European languages, and these resources are open
to the general public and all Rocky Mountain educational institutions.
Furthermore, over 4,000 high school students of French, German, and Spanish
come from Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming to compete in one of the largest Foreign
Language Fairs for K–12 language study in the West. Currently 513
post-secondary institutions use BYU language programs (CAPE, CLIPS, FLATS,
and OTS).
Location
CSE is housed with the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies
in the Herald L. Clark building. In its first few months with the new
Title VI grant, the center has offered Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS)
Internships to graduate students, has funded new library acquisitions,
language modules in the social sciences, outreach programs for public
school educators, faculty research projects, guest lecturers, and conferences.
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