Patrick Mendis - Visiting Professor To China, Russia, and SAS

Visiting Professor To China, Russia, and SAS

Through the University of Maryland University College's faculty exchange program, Professor Mendis taught courses in American government, English, and culture to Chinese students at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xian. He traveled throughout China, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Tibet. After publishing his latest two books, TRADE for PEACE and Commercial Providence, Mendis was invited to China to give a series of lectures at prestigious universities in Beijing, Chengdu, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Nanjing, and Shanghai. The Center for International Strategic and Security Studies at the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies has appointed him as a consulting professor of international relations. Professor Mendis is an advisor to The Encyclopedia of Sri Lanka Diaspora project at the National University of Singapore.

While at the University of Minnesota, he also led the U.S. team selected to teach market economics and management to a group of former KGB officers, young Russian entrepreneurs, and faculty members at Saint Petersburg State University (previously known as Leningrad State University in the former Soviet Union). During the historic 1991 summer in the former Soviet Union, Professor Mendis also lectured at the Moscow State University and toured the Kremlin and the Russian White House in Moscow.

As a visiting professor of economics and public policy at the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea (SAS) program, Professor Mendis traveled to the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Based on his first-hand observations of globalization and Americanization, he authored a series of articles, which later expanded into a book, the Human Side of Globalization, in which he explained his experience in meeting with Fidel Castro of Cuba in 2004. He has worked in, and traveled to, more than 100 countries and visited all 50 states in the United States.