Program Overview

The Doctor of Philosophy is offered in French and Hispanic Studies (Plan I) and in two Romance Literatures (Plan II). The Department also offers a Masters in French, Hispanic Studies and Italian, and two joint Masters (MAT and MA/MBA) in coordination with the Lynch Graduate School of Education, and the Carroll School of Management, respectively.

The doctoral programs provide students with the requisite training to become effective scholars and competent pedagogues of one or more of the romance languages at the University level. The Masters programs prepare students to enter doctoral programs, to teach one of the romance languages, or for positions in the fields of education and publishing.

The graduate curriculum is designed to offer broad coverage in the study of French and Francophone, Iberian, Latin American, and Italian literatures, and it therefore offers courses conducted entirely in the target language. Survey courses are interspersed with seminars that are organized according to more specialized principles of research, such as author, theme, genre, or theoretical approach. Sensitive to the many different ways that the study of literature has been pursued over the past two hundred years, graduate programs in RLL offer students an opportunity to explore literary and cultural phenomena of the romance languages from a large number of traditional and contemporary perspectives. To this end, in addition to completing courses in all the other areas, doctoral students are required to complete one course focused on literary theory as well as one course on the history of language.

The general aim of courses in the Department is to combine the close reading of major works of a romance language with an appreciation of how and why the study of literature continues to occupy a privileged position with respect to confronting the challenges of communication and understanding that necessarily underlie all the liberal arts and that are negotiated daily in every walk of life. The complexity of literary language makes it an obvious object of interest for a full appreciation of the subtle but forceful way that social and cultural activities are constructed and carried out within any given community of speakers. The self-conscious function of literature as fiction allows for the elaboration of alternative visions of reality; it therefore relates the endeavors of our department directly to the goals, methods, and problems that are encountered not only in every aesthetic activity, but also in the more overtly historical, philosophical, theological and social-scientific disciplines of research and knowledge.