Course Description: The Art of Travel” is an online e-course for Gallatin students studying abroad. It is intended to provide students with an opportunity to reflect, analytically and creatively, on their travel experiences. We will examine some of the art created by travelers—travel literature, photography, paintings, video—as well as considering how traveling well can itself be viewed as an art. The course looks at the phenomenon of travel from a broad interdisciplinary perspective: the history of the Grand Tour and its evolution into study abroad, the sociology of tourism, the political and economic dimensions of global travel, and the representation of travel in the visual arts and literature.

All of the course activities are conducted on the class website: students blog about their responses to the readings and their own travels, talk with each other in a chat room, post photos and videos, and write analytic and creative essays about travel. Some of the assigned readings are for the whole group so there is a common point of departure, but other readings are individualized for the city and country of each study-abroad site. The course is set up as a Gallatin independent-study tutorial for two credits, and enrollment is limited to students studying at one of NYU’s study abroad sites—preferably one student at each of the sites. Together the students will form an online learning community that should help them feel like they’re a bit more connected to Gallatin while they’re abroad