A sampling of the recent and current long-term-research projects of our faculty provides eloquent testimony of the Department of French and Italian’s deep engagement with interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research:

• New digital techniques and medieval manuscript editions
• Ethics from antiquity to the Renaissance
• Classical rhetoric and the Renaissance
• Atheism and religious tolerance from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
• Politico-theological underpinnings of Louis XIV’s absolutism
• Visual and literary cultures in Renaissance and Baroque Italy
• The role of technology in the production and reception of early modern drama
• The image of America in France during the second half of the 18th century
• Literature and the visual arts in 19th-century French culture
• Illustrations and the development of the publishing industry in France
• Gender, display, and displacement in 20th-century Francophone fiction
• Forms and functions of poster art in WWI France
• Exile and migration in contemporary literary studies
• Postcolonial and transfrontier approaches to literature
• Contemporary urban culture and arts in African and African diaspora cities
• Orality and media in Francophone cultures
• Narrative trends in the design of board games and the use of figurines in play
• Americanization of Italian cinema during the Cold War
• Italian American women film directors
• Historical-etymological-comparative study of French in North America
• Spoken French and other Gallo-Romance dialects
• Pronominal systems in Medieval Romance
• Language knowledge and acquisition at the intersection of linguistics with cognitive psychology and neurocognition