Global Heritage

Living responsibly and functioning effectively in our increasingly interconnected world requires understanding alternative worldviews. The Global Heritage Program at Carthage ensures that every Carthage student will confront and engage with the works of a tradition of intellectual depth, complexity, and beauty whose basis is non-Western.

A Vital Component of the Carthage Core

The Global Heritage Program complements Carthage’s Intellectual Foundations Program. While Intellectual Foundations covers the roots of European cultural traditions, Global Heritage courses explore cultures and traditions with substantial non-European elements. Students encounter cultures whose central questions are framed in different ways and whose responses have taken them down different paths. Students explore and understand cultural differences in our increasingly plural nation.

What is Required?

Students who entered Carthage before the 2022-23 academic year are required to take one Global Heritage course.

Students who entered Carthage in 2022-23 or later are not required to take a Global Heritage course.

Students should look for a four-credit course in the College Catalog that has the designation (GH).

The Global Heritage requirement can be completed by courses taken either on campus or through off-campus study. In either case, courses satisfying this requirement are approved by the Global Heritage Oversight Committee and are designated in the course schedule.

Global Heritage courses

Through Global Heritage, Carthage students have studied Middle Eastern literature, Latin American heritage, Islam, the Sikhs, American Indian Ethnohistory, Asian History, Asian Art and Architecture, and more. Many J-Term study tours fulfill the Global Heritage requirement as well, including recent study tours to China, Nicaragua, and Senegal.