Humanities merges small departments

By Ellen Trinklein     3/14/15 6:49am

Soon, there will no longer be a French studies department, Spanish and Portuguese department, German studies department, Latin American studies department or classical studies department. Effective July 1 for the 2015-16 academic year, the School of Humanities is merging its smallest departments into two larger ones: the department of classical and European studies and the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American studies. 

This merger will combine German studies, French studies and classical studies into the department of classical and European studies. Latin American studies and the department of Spanish and Portuguese will similarly combine to make the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American studies. The majors within the departments will remain as they are now. 

According to Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway, all majors and major requirements will remain unchanged, and students’ transcripts will continue to state “French studies” or “classical studies.”

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“Students will hardly notice,” Shumway said. “As far as students are concerned, the ATM has another bank behind it, but it will still look same.”

According to Shumway, the only change for students with these majors is the new interdisciplinary opportunities the larger departments will be able to provide students.

One such opportunity, a new minor in politics, law and social thought, will become available next year through the department of classical and European studies with elective courses in departments such as philosophy, political science and anthropology. Shumway also noted the possibility of a program in comparative literature.German professor Christian Emden, one of the professors leading the new minor, expressed interest in a film program.

The ability to breach the divisions between majors in the form of new majors and minors is, according to both Shumway and Emden, one of the largest benefits of the new departments.

“Small departments … are obviously not able to pull that off by themselves,” Emden said. “In fact, I would even go so far to argue that classical and European studies offers the opportunity to think outside traditional departmental structures. Students and faculty alike often forget that departments are nothing but administrative units that are not coextensive with the research questions we all work on.”

In addition to creating a space for interdisciplinary opportunities and administrative efficiency, Shumway said the merger makes sense for intellectual reasons.

“People have more and more questioned the existence of the nation state, or that culture is somehow based in the nation state,” Shumway said. “There’s a lot of cross-pollination. The Enlightenment doesn’t just happen in one place; it’s something that engulfs all of Europe.”

Emden also said the merger will increase student awareness of how vast and interdisciplinary many of these departments are.

“German studies or French studies shouldn’t even be called ‘language departments.’ After all, we don't call mathematics the ‘numbers department’ or engineering the ‘gadget school,’” Emden said. “What students really become involved in when they opt for German studies, for instance, is the study of literature, politics, film, history, philosophy, intellectual history and so on — all in a setting that is much more interdisciplinary than what happens in many traditional departments.”

Laurel Bingman, a Duncan College senior majoring in biological sciences and Latin American studies, said the interdisciplinary aspect of her Latin American studies major is what interests her.

“I’ve personally enjoyed the freedom to be able to mold my major into whatever I wanted it to be, so I could see a lot of benefits in pooling resources from already established departments in that way,” Bingman said. “On the other hand, I can also see potential disadvantages if priority is given to other subsets within the department purely because they are more established.”

                                                                                                    

 

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