The intellectual and curricular work of our department emerges from four research networks that reflect our interdisciplinarity and engagement with the most pressing questions of our time: Film and Media; Gender and Sexuality; Nation/Transnation; and Environment.
Words, sounds, and images move today at unprecedented speed through the world and into the everyday texture of our lives. When studying cultural production, it is essential to understand that the different material objects and technologies around us shape what we see and how we perceive and create the world.
Since the middle ages, the French and Italians have had much to say about women, feminism, masculinity, transgender, and sexuality. Graduate students interested in gender and sexuality will find an extremely vibrant intellectual home in FRIT.
What do the languages and histories of Italian and French-speaking world regions have to tell us about national and transnational identities from the medieval Mediterranean to contemporary experiences of migration? What does it mean to “do” French or Italian studies in dialogue with global, migration, diaspora, and postcolonial studies?
Courses and research opportunities abound in FRIT for students interested in cultural production on environmental problems, from climate change to global warming, pollution and deforestation, as well as migration and urbanization. French and Italian studies have long taken up such topics of the Environmental Humanities, or the cross-disciplinary study of the complex interaction between humans and the environment.