Italian at Illinois, one of the oldest Italian programs in the U.S., is also one of the few Italian Studies programs that offers courses from the undergraduate to the doctoral level. The Program is built on the idea of interdisciplinary coordination and it is meant for students who are interested in Italian culture and language at any level. We focus on providing transferable skills, comparative awareness, and analytical abilities to students interested in exploring thousands of years of Italian experience in the Mediterranean, European, and Global contexts.MA students complete a course of study equivalent to the Italian laurea magistrale. The goal of the MA in Italian is to provide a linguistic, cultural, and critical foundation for specialized work in Italian Studies. Those who are interested in teaching Italian as a second language or in having the cultural competence to work in everything IItalian should consider the MA either as a coronation of their learning experience or as a stepping stone for their future careers.The graduate program in Italian Studies is committed to the interdisciplinary study of Italian literature and culture. Our faculty work on areas ranging from literature and cinema to medieval and early modern culture to history and critical theory. Recent and current graduate students working in Italian have written on topics ranging from the literature of extracomunitari in Italy, Dante's body in the context of pilgrimage texts, the acquisition of verb morphology, to postmodernism and detective fiction. Prospective graduate students should know that they will receive a training appropriate for an ever-more interdisciplinary profession, and that they will have the resources of a major university, ranging from the European Union Center to the largest public university library in the world, containing world-famous Dante, Tasso, and Italian Renaissance Plays collections.