ABSTRACT
Colby College is a small liberal arts college in central Maine, located in the little city of Waterville. Nevertheless, the school has been increasingly successful in offering its students global experiences. Throughout my twenty-nine years at the college, upwards of three-quarters of our students have taken a semester abroad in their junior year, and many of our faculty and programs have embraced research in the communities beyond the “Colby bubble” and beyond the U.S. In its recent “transformational” capital campaign, the college identified global connections and universal student experiences as two key themes. One key consequence has been the creation of “DavisConnects [which] provides Colby students global, internship, and research experiences regardless of personal networks, connections, and financial means” (DavisConnects n.d.). Essentially, the college has reimagined the standard career center as an access point to experiences beyond and after Colby, most significantly enabling global encounters. In line with these aspirations, EN412: Global Shakespeares, in both its incarnations, took on the complex task of negotiating the necessity of preparing college students for their interactions with the wider world beyond a semi-rural northeastern U.S. community. This chapter illuminates the crucial ways that world cinema and art proved an effective means of addressing that task.
