Michael Jenkins’s road from graduate school at Penn State to the economics faculty at St. Lawrence went through the United Kingdom.  “Teaching and living in another country has given me a perspective on the world that I could get only from spending time outside of the U.S.,” explained the Eggleston associate professor.

Jenkins taught at the University of Wales for two years and at the University of Hull in England for a year. He says he was attracted to the opportunity to teach in the UK because he wanted to experience something different. “I'm a real Anglophile, so no better place for me to do that than the UK,” he comments.

Jenkins is particularly interested in international issues and globalization. “What motivated me to study economics was to learn about how people interact on a global level,” he says “For me, that means studying about international economic issues.”

Jenkins enjoys teaching in the First-Year Program (FYP). “The living and learning environment of the FYP allows students to feel very comfortable speaking their minds. This makes for great classroom discussion,” he notes. “Plus, teaching with a colleague, Karl Schonberg of government, I learn a lot myself.”

Jenkins and Schonberg are teaching an FYP course on the political economy of globalization, “a wonderful topic for a course because we live in an increasingly interconnected world,” he observes.

During the spring of 2006 Jenkins was the FYP instructor on St. Lawrence’s France program; he hopes in the future to be more involved with international education and with other SLU international study programs.
Outside of the classroom and the world of economics, Jenkins admits that he is a “politics news junkie.”