Eric Adjetey Anang and his fantasy coffins were featured on the Dec. 7 WorldCanvass discussion.

Now through Dec. 10 at the Black Box Theater in the Iowa Memorial Union, you’ll find an exhibition of six large, painted, wooden objects: an airplane, honeybee, corncob, red chili pepper and an Oxford-style dress shoe. Another represents a water spirit known as Mami Wata. Nothing immediately apparent unites them. Yes, two have wings and two are vegetables, and the airplane and dress shoe might suggest some economic privileges. The display of the corncob, however, makes it clear that these are coffins, or “fantasy coffins,” according to the exhibition headline, created by artist Eric Adjetey Anang.

Richard “Dick” Stanley passed away on November 17, 2017. A memorial service was held at 11 a.m. on Saturday, December 2, at the First Presbyterian Church of Muscatine. Dick was a great friend of International Programs, and an unwavering supporter of international education and global understanding. He supported international education because he firmly believed that knowing more about the world and its myriad peoples and cultures provides a strong foundation for peace and justice. He demonstrated this belief in his career as an engineer, through his leadership roles in the Stanley Foundation and in other organizations, and in his life. Dick was an early proponent of internationalization at the University of Iowa.

Would you like to teach English, study, or do research abroad for an academic year at no cost? Join International Programs for the sixth-annual intensive Fulbright U.S. Student Program workshop on Friday, January 26, 2018, from 8:45 a.m. to 12 p.m. in 2520 University Capitol Centre.

Like many of my fellow bloggers, my time abroad is coming to a close. And as a result, I’ve found myself questioning if I’ve made the most of my time here because as we so often hear, studying abroad really is a once (or twice if you’re lucky) in a lifetime opportunity.

The UI is one of many schools around the nation experiencing a drop in the number of new foreign students — and the negative effects are taking shape.

Peking University is ranked, along with Tsinghua University, among China’s premier institutions for higher education. The rigorous college entrance exam is the determining factor for students aspiring to enter the school’s rigorous academic environment. With that said, the Chinese education system is vastly different from American and Western education apparatuses. I am not fully matriculated at Peking University. Instead, I am enrolled in the School of Foreign Languages, which educates numerous international students that arrive in Beijing with varying language proficiencies.

Study abroad… have you heard about it? It changes your life. Yeah, I’m sure you have heard that one before. The thing is it's true, travel does something to you.

What we English speakers call sea lions Spanish speakers call lobos marinos. Lobo means wolf. For the last couple of days I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to rationalize this in my sunburnt head. When they first saw those chubby mustachioed sea beasts, how did they settle on wolf? In all fairness they don’t really look like lions either. If it were up to me I’d officially change their name to sea bears, or better yet sea puppy dogs.

2017 marks the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution. That tumultuous century saw Russia reject the Romanov dynasty which had ruled for over three hundred years and embrace a new ideology whose leader, Vladimir Lenin, would become the head of the world’s first communist state.  The world watched as the Soviet Union re-created a Russian-dominated empire, lost millions of lives to purges and terror,  withstood the onslaught of Nazi Germany, faced off against the West during the Cold War, then dissolved, with Russia re-emerging under Vladimir Putin as a central player in global power politics.