Faculty & Staff

"Semester at Sea is one of the premier academic programs that offers an alternative foreign educational experience through a firsthand multicultural environment in a classroom without walls."

—Paul Rosen, Semester at Sea, Summer 2005

Teaching and Living on a Shipboard Campus

At the core of the Semester at Sea academic experience is an innovative, stimulating, and flexible team of educators who are passionate about global education. The shipboard environment of Semester at Sea offers the special opportunity for intensely engaged learning and exchange. Because our program is conducted on a ship turned world-traveling university, our faculty and staff are hands-on practitioners who both are excited by and adaptable to a non-traditional living and working shipboard environment.

Collectively, our faculty is expert, dynamic, and curious: 100% hold doctorates or other terminal degrees and 100% have international experience and expertise in one or more of the regions visited. Our faculty—a team of roughly 30 individuals each academic term—are selected for their global scholarship and teaching ability by a University of Virginia Dean. They are supported and complemented by a group of 30-35 additional staff members, who are experts in their fields.

Semester at Sea faculty and staff are flexible and progressive individuals who are willing to move beyond the confines of the ivory tower to create innovative and responsive global curricula. They are resourceful achievers who can attain academic goals without all of the conveniences they may be accustomed to on their land-based campuses. Almost without exception, faculty members find the voyage to be so professionally and personally rewarding that they apply to sail again.