Italian Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Italian Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill

Italy is a country of vast geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity, and its history and cultural production reflect this diversity. Since the beginning, Italy has been at the center of Western civilization, absorbing, transforming, and innovating all cultural aspects of the ancient, medieval, and modern eras: from Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Byzantine, and medieval societies to the Renaissance and contemporary European Community, of which Italy is a founding member. According to statistics compiled by UNESCO, the Italian peninsula has produced at least 70 percent of the so-called treasures of humankind.

Italian, by far the closest Romance language to Latin, provides extraordinary opportunities for English speakers to better understand their own language and enrich their active vocabulary, as 70 percent of the words in the English dictionary come from Latin.

UNC-Chapel Hill has a proud tradition of Italian studies. At the undergraduate level, students may pursue a major or minor in Italian, in which they take courses on Italian language, literature, film, and culture. The field is growing, with increasing course offerings and an increasing number of enrolled students and majors. Italian majors and minors and all UNC students have the opportunity to spend a semester or an academic year in Italy. Every year more than eleven hundred students are enrolled in undergraduate Italian courses, in addition to the two-hundred-and-fifty students who study Italian in Italy. There are also many extracurricular opportunities for undergraduates, including an Italian Club, an Italian film festival, an Italian House, and an advanced Italian Conversation group.

At the graduate level, Carolina offers an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Italian studies. Graduate students take courses in the literature of diverse centuries and genres while learning a range of literary theories and the tools of literary criticism. As Graduate Teaching Fellows, they have intensive training in teaching methodology, teach one or two beginning language courses per semester, and have access to the university’s innovative instructional technologies. During the last thirty years, the graduate program of Italian Studies has conferred twenty-one master’s degrees and twenty-two doctoral degrees to students who have then accepted academic positions in outstanding colleges throughout the country. Currently, graduate students in Italian also have the opportunity to do supporting programs, including certificate programs in other disciplines, including Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, and Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

In addition to serving its own students, the Italian section also serves the entire university community with its language and culture courses and its series of Italian cultural events.