The Department of French and Italian is fully committed to the campus’s goals of promoting anti-racist thinking, combatting institutional racism, and promoting diversity both within our department and across the community.
Historically, our teaching mission has been focused on France and Italy, where the history of racism and the struggle against it has played out differently than in the United States. In this way, our department offers a unique view of diversity, equity, and inclusion from a comparative context, enriching the campus conversation on these issues with our cross-cultural and transnational perspective.
In order to expand and improve our efforts to achieve those goals, the department has developed a Diversity Plan, which seeks to promote change on three distinct levels:
1. Hiring and recruitment practices: Working to find better ways to diversify our faculty and student body.
2. Institutional review: Reviewing and updating as necessary our practices relating to curricular design, instructional materials, teaching practices, educational priorities, and departmental culture.
3. Educational inreach/outreach: Organizing an ongoing series of public educational events, on topics of scholarly and artistic interest, as well as implementing workshops designed to promote self-reflection on our departmental culture.
In addition to these goals, our department's curriculum has evolved to incorporate instruction on the history of colonialism, decolonization, postcolonial cultures, migration, and minority cultures and languages in relation to French- and Italian-speaking worlds. Please check our website regularly for an updated list of course offerings and events.