Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Welcome to the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

There are many reasons to study other languages and cultures. By studying literary and cultural values, both past and present, we gain important insights into ourselves and others that enable us to confront the intellectual, social, and political challenges of the future. From a purely practical standpoint, knowledge of languages and cultures will provide a competitive edge in the increasingly globalized and complex workplace of the 21st century.

The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at CUA is a dynamic community of teacher-scholars with widely varying backgrounds (Arabic, Chinese, Italian, German, Spanish, French, American, Latin-American, etc.), interests, and theoretical approaches. While remaining grounded in a broadly humanistic tradition of intellectual inquiry and scholarship, we are committed to opening a dialogue with other disciplines--including CUA programs such as Philosophy, Media Studies, History, Comparative Literature, Semitic Languages and Literatures, Classics, and Medieval Studies--and with the consortium and intellectual community at large. In our classrooms and research, we thus seek to combine a solid foundation in national literatures with the interdisciplinary pursuit of new fields of investigation.