Engaging with a vast body of theoretical work within and beyond Romance Studies, we strive to promote debate and deeper understanding of the potential, limits and specificities of the various aspects of the contemporary media landscape and its social and political implications.

Race, gender, and sexuality figure as both critical modes of analysis and historical objects of inquiry. This intersectional cluster of concerns proves crucial to the history of the subject, notions of the human/non-human, as well as contemporary formations of collective identity.

Romance Studies participates in a longstanding tradition at Cornell of scholarship that bridges literary theory and criticism with philosophical approaches to literature, language and culture.

Early Modern Studies brings together some of Cornell’s foremost scholars working on a generalized crisis of European civilization that arose in a long historical period (1550-1700) with particular repercussions in Spain, France and Italy.

Literary Cartographies trace and analyze the ebbs and flows of people, cultures, languages, and ideas that span colonial contexts, cosmopolitan routes, and so-called ‘peripheral’ spaces around the globe.

Medieval Studies in the Department of Romance Studies encompass the interdisciplinary investigation of a diverse set of cultures of Western Europe spanning from the 7th or 8th centuries through the 15th in dialogue with Mediterranean cultures, such as those of Byzantium, Sicily, and Al-Andalus.

A number of scholars in the department explore how the political is thought about today. These include philosophical critiques of politics under the rubrics of the apolitical and the impolitical; the intersection of the biological with the political in biopolitcs; and Marxian-influenced readings of the contemporary moment.