The Department of French and Italian has been a leading center of research and teaching of Mediterranean Studies at Illinois since its foundation. Faculty in the Department offer courses on the History of the Idea of the Mediterranean, Languages and Minorities in the Mediterranean, and national cultural histories in the Mediterranean context. Both faculty and doctoral students are actively researching the Mediterranean as a source of transnational identities, alternative modernities, and peripheral countercultures. From Linguistics to Ecocriticism, from Intellectual History to Literary and Visual Studies, the Department considers the Mediterranean one of its crucial areas of interest.