Department of Foreign Languages

Department of Foreign Languages

The Department of Foreign Languages teaches undergraduate language, literature, culture, linguistics and pedagogy. Our major/minor programs are in French, German, and Latin; we have minors in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian, and teach beginning and intermediate classes in Italian. We offer education degrees in French, German, Latin, and Russian.

Our department participates in interdisciplinary areas and programs on campus at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These programs include the Medieval Institute, the Soga Japan Center, Canadian Studies, the Greater China Study Group, Global and International Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, World Literature, and Linguistics.

The department has twelve faculty-directed study abroad programs and more than a dozen exchange programs abroad, in China, Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Quebec, and Russia.

Our mission is the following: to provide the university and community with an in-depth, authentic experience of modern and classical languages, literatures, and cultures; to achieve excellence in research, scholarship and creative endeavors and bring our work into the classroom as well as to the larger community; to promote students’ integration of language knowledge within another field, helping them to develop their analytical competence in one of the human arts and sciences or a professional field; and to serve as a locus of both discipline-based study--literature, culture, linguistics, and translation--and interdisciplinarity on campus.

Japanese poet Ito Hiromi reading her work “The Maltreatment of Meaning” at WMU with Prof. Jeffrey Angles of the Japanese section.

 

Department of Foreign Languages
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5338 USA
269.387.3001| FAX 269.387.6333