Department mission
The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures is the home for study of the languages which evolved from Latin through the intermediary of medieval "Romanz" to modern-day French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The unity of the Department lies in this common origin and in the resulting commonalities of the four languages as well as in a convergence of interests and purposes. The research, education, and service missions of the Department may be broadly described as semiotic : we train students to become aware of and proficient in sign systems, beginning with those of one or more Romance languages (as well as English), and including a wide range of literary and cultural sign systems. Graduate and faculty research may be broadly characterized as the discovery of sign systems at work in the literatures and cultures we study, whether the sign systems are artistic, political, psychological, or cultural. A distinguishing feature of our discipline is precisely this initiation into the study of literary and cultural sign systems via those of language, hence the centrality of language to our scholarly work and pedagogy.