Walsh School of Foreign Service
school of international affairs at Georgetown University
The Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) is the school of international relations at Georgetown University, a congressionally-chartered Jesuit research university in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1919, SFS is the oldest continuously operating school for international affairs in the United States, predating the U.S. Foreign Service by six years. It grants degrees at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
SFS was established by Edmund A. Walsh with the goal of preparing Americans for various international professions in the wake of expanding U.S. involvement in world affairs after World War I. Today, the school hosts a student body of approximately 2,250 from over 100 nations each year. It offers an undergraduate program based in the liberal arts, which leads to the Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (BSFS) degree, as well as eight interdisciplinary graduate programs.
Based in Washington, D.C., the school also maintains campuses in Doha, Qatar, and Jakarta, Indonesia. SFS is a founding member of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA), a consortium of the world's leading public policy, public administration, and international affairs schools.
History
20th century
With the help of Georgetown University president John B. Creeden, Edmund A. Walsh spearheaded the founding of the School of Foreign Service and its establishment was announced on November 25, 1919. The school's use of the name “Foreign Service” preceded the formal establishment of the U.S. Foreign Service by six years. The school was envisioned by Walsh to prepare students for all major forms of foreign representation from commercial, financial, consular to diplomatic.
In 1921, it graduated its first class of Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (BSFS) undergraduate students.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q128047. VIAF identifies the subject as 129386694. The Library of Congress control number is n81028886. Authority coordinates are 38.907, -77.073. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1919 and 1921.
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This entry incorporates text from “Walsh School of Foreign Service” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.