The Minors have taken classes, at Cornell and abroad, in European politics, history, art, and ideas, and have studied various European languages: French was the clear winner this year, with more than half of graduating European Studies Minors studying it, followed by Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Turkish. Keeping with IES’s interdisciplinary tradition, the Minors come from several colleges and majors, including, beyond Government and History, Industrial and Labor Relations, Psychology, Philosophy, Economics, Comparative Literature, Information Science, and Environment and Sustainability. Some favorite Minor classes at Cornell have been: HIST 2860: The French Revolution, ROMS 3300: The Culture of Violence: Europe 1914-1945, COML 3012: Remembering Socialism: Literature and Film after the End of History, and ITAL 3010: Screening la Cosa Nostra.

Several students have taken advantage of opportunities offered by IES and by the broader Global Cornell, such as the IES/PACS-funded Global Internships in Spain and Bosnia Herzegovina, and the IES undergraduate Harum, Conger Wood, and Susan Tarrow research fellowships. European Studies minors have attended our Institute’s lectures and workshops and have travelled to study abroad in places like Oxford, Paris, Turin, Athens, and Berlin.

After graduation, our ES Minors have a variety of career plans, including work in finance, strategy consulting, teaching, book publishing, think tanks, and policy and foreign affairs, as well as further study in law or graduate school.

Three out of the four Cornellians who won Europe Fulbright student awards for 2026-27 are European Studies Minors, including two graduating Minors, Nina Davis ’26, who won an English Teaching Assistant Fulbright in Portugal, and Madeleine Kapsalis ’26, English Teaching Assistant Fulbright in Greece.

The Minor in European Studies is at the core of IES’s engagement with undergraduate students. We are delighted that our students have confidently sought and embraced knowledge about European cultures, histories, and societies. These studies offer a perspective for understanding ourselves, here in America, as well as for understanding the whole world better. This perspective will be useful to our students as they venture into the great, wide world beyond college.

 By Patricia Young, Senior Program Manager for the Institute for European Studies