Start of the Spring Semester

With the start of the Spring academic semester, we are happy to be welcoming our new students – and welcoming back our continuing students. As always at AGS, this semester's incoming students form a diverse group, coming from the US, Kenya, Rwanda, Egypt, Oman, France, and Taiwan. AGS embraces this diversity of backgrounds and cultures as a part of the educational experience in the international relations program.

This semester, we are also welcoming a new faculty member: Larry Kilman will be teaching the NGO Management course. Mr. Kilman is Associate Director for Communications at the Institute for Media Strategies and the former Secretary-General of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). He worked as a journalist for more than 20 years in Asia, Europe and the United States, primarily with Agence France-Presse, Radio Free Europe and The Associated Press. He will share his expertise and enthusiasm by teaching the practical aspects of developing and managing an NGO, which complement the theoretical course on NGOs taught in the fall by Professor Ruchi Anand (the two courses together form the Graduate Certificate in NGO Management program at AGS). To support and enhance the scope of this program, Mr. Kilman has created NGO Blog, an information resource from the NGO community, for the NGO community, featuring NGO news, best management practices, information about grant opportunities, and other relevant materials to help NGOs succeed in their essential work.

A novelty of the semester includes a regular seminar series on religion and international relations, which will seek to explore the links between religious beliefs and global politics. These seminars are hosted by AGS with faculty and graduate students from AGS and other institutions, under the initiative of Manlio Graziano, AGS's specialist of geopolitics and geopolitics of religion, and Christophe Grannec, a sociologist of religions and a member of a research group on this subject at the French National Scientific Research Center (CNRS). The first seminar will be held on February 3rd and 4th; a few seats are open to the public on RSVP (rsvp@ags.edu).

Other highlights of the semester include AGS's annual Graduate Student Conference, which will be held on April 21st. The theme this year is Non-Western Perspectives in International Relations; it derives inspiration from the non-Western students at AGS who often ask questions about the Western biases in international relations – another way to embrace, and get enriched by, AGS's cultural diversity. More information on the conference here.