World Culture

The Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures is a portal to world cultures.  Traveling through that portal reveals that cultures evolve in relation to each other. They borrow, imitate, steal, transfer and co-create both artistic works and ostensibly separate cultural identity. In LCL, students can learn about the intersections of cultures and the ways that peoples rely on claims about cultural traditions in their encounters with others.  Courses and degree programs in LCL allow students to explore transnational cinema, colonial and postcolonial novels, comics and anime, mythology, folk and fairy tales, women’s writing around the world, connections between the past and the present.

Topics for courses in cultural study include damned heroes and the Faustian bargain, global food-ways, witches, migration, apocalypse, Russian ideas of terrorism, trauma and cultural memory, the European discovery of the New World, Ancient Rome in contemporary media, conflict and liberation in African literature and film.