The Italian section of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures offers an undergraduate major and minor, a PhD program, and opportunities for students to be involved in research and study abroad. The program also runs a rich series of talks, film screenings, and panel discussions with authors, directors, artists, performers, and other professionals.

Undergraduate courses give students the opportunity to study Italian language from the elementary level through advanced composition and grammar, as well as literature, film, and cultural studies.

The Italian Ph.D. program emphasizes work in three complementary areas: literary history, textual analysis, and theory of interpretation, and includes teaching training and practice. Graduate students are also part of the editorial team for Modern Language Notes, one of the most prestigious journals in the field

The Spanish and Portuguese Program at Johns Hopkins University immerses you in experiencing the importance and influence of the Iberian, Latin American, and Luso-Afro-Brazilian histories, cultures, and languages worldwide. The program offers undergraduate majors and minors in Spanish and Portuguese, a Ph.D. program, and opportunities for students to be involved in research and study abroad.

The program features a faculty with expertise across the fields of early modern, modern, contemporary Latin American and Iberian literature and culture, foreign language teaching, linguistics, and second language acquisition. The program’s interdisciplinary strengths include ecocriticism, visual culture, media studies, intellectual history, and political thought.

The German program at Johns Hopkins is among the most distinguished in North America. It has been a leading force in literary criticism with recognized strength in the intersection of literature and philosophy from the Enlightenment to the present. The faculty is committed to the study of works of art in conjunction with political theory, gender and sexuality studies, environmental thought, history of science, religion, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and media theory. The interdisciplinary orientation of the program has led to important contributions in the study of phenomenology and poetry, romanticism and gender, early modern science and baroque literature, the modern novel and print history, cognitive aesthetics and literary affect, among many other topics. A further interest lies in the problem of representation with an eye toward the aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications of this overarching topic.

The French program at Johns Hopkins University features a distinguished and dynamic faculty with expertise in early modern, modern, and contemporary French literature, as well as in topics in cultural studies, film, and the teaching of the French language. We offer an undergraduate major and two minors, as well as a PhD in French literature.

As part of a leading research institution, we are committed to:

• Integrating language acquisition and literary and cultural study, so as to provide the strongest intellectual and professional training to Hopkins undergraduates
• Preparing our doctoral candidates for theoretically informed research in broad historical frameworks as well as for innovative classroom teaching
• Engaging with emergent forms of literary and cultural knowledge linked to the French-speaking world, in a spirit of collaborative research.

French has a long and distinguished history at Johns Hopkins, having played a leading role in embracing and circulating critical approaches and methods. Ground-breaking modern literary theory was born here in its dialogue with the interdisciplinary French structuralist and post-structuralist projects, which united under the banner of language such diverse intellectual endeavors as anthropology, history, philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas. In our teaching and research, as well as through the lectures and colloquia of the Centre Louis Marin and the Hopkins Literature Forum, we are pursuing and deepening this distinctive tradition in critical thought.