about-ban
 

our history

Our department is housed in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, and we take seriously our affiliation with our namesake, Arkansas native, U.S. Senator, and creator of the renowned Fulbright Scholarship Program, established to promote international understanding and global academic exchange.  We seek to do this by embodying and instilling in our students the values of full-fledged global citizenship, which requires the kind of deep cultural understanding that only truly comes with progress towards mastery of other languages. 

World Language education has been around at the University of Arkansas as long as the university itself, and we are privileged to carry on this long tradition. Over the years, our language programs have come and gone and returned and seen many departmental configurations. Our current configuration as a Department of Foreign Languages dates back to 1949, and we made the change to our current department name in 2009.

what we do

We offer courses in eleven different languages, with minors in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and majors in French, German, Spanish, and Classical Studies. At the graduate level we offer an M.A. in Modern Languages for French and German; an M.A. in Spanish, and many of our faculty teach courses and direct dissertations within our multi-tracked Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.

WHo we are

World Languages faculty are also key participants in a number of strong and growing interdisciplinary programs housed in Fulbright College, including Gender Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Asian Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, European Studies, and Humanities

We offer courses in eleven languages, including less commonly taught languages such as Portuguese, Russian, and Cherokee.

We are also proud of our   World Languages and Digital Humanities Studio, which keeps our faculty and students current with the latest technologies for research, teaching, and learning.

Department members direct and supervise a number of U of A faculty-led programs in the summers, in addition to several academic-year exchange programs we currently have available; and our faculty work with the Office of Study Abroad to help send more than 700 U of A students abroad to 42 countries.

learn more about us

To learn more about our department, please navigate the links on the left, where you will find language-specific resources on each program, syllabi, links to professor web pages, information about study abroad, and more.

Or see what great things are happening in the department by visiting our News and Events, Featured Alumni, and Students pages.