Graduate Program
The Department of Romance Studies at Duke University offers PhDs in Italian and French Studies, Italian and Spanish/Latin American Studies, and Italian and Lusophone Studies. Comparative in scope, theoretical in focus, and flexible in design, these PhDs are designed for students whose work on Italian literature and culture intimately engages other Romance cultural traditions. A student's individual course of study is developed in close and regular consultation with members of the faculty in order to provide a meaningfully interdisciplinary curriculum that responds to a student's particular interests and strengths.
The PhD takes advantage of the nationally and internationally recognized faculty of specialists that constitute the Department of Romance Studies. During the academic year, the department also sponsors numerous lectures and visits by distinguished critics and writers, and benefits from intellectual exchanges with nearby Italian Studies programs like those at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wake Forest University, as well as, regular exchanges with the National Humanities Center. In addition, the Duke learning environment includes exceptional library and computer facilities in the humanities. Perkins Library, one of the nation's major research libraries, houses among others the Guido Mazzoni Collection, which comprises over 49,000 rare and hard-to-find Italian pamphlets, newspapers, clippings, small volumes, librettos, epithalamia, and broadsides from the late sixteenth century to 1943.
Examples of Romance Studies tracks include the study of the Italian philosophy of fascism and its translation in Francoist Spain; the literature of migration; the politics of national unification; the development of Medieval lyric poetry; the novella tradition; Petrarchism and the diffusion of the sonnet; Renaissance cultural exchanges; thematic explorations such as French and Italian encounters with the Ottoman Empire.
Please see additional information on the Romance Studies PhD and the Graduate School.