The undergraduate program in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies (MESAAS) offers students the opportunity to study in depth the cultures, ideas, histories, and politics of several overlapping world regions. The program emphasizes a close engagement with intellectual traditions, creative movements, and political debates, drawing on a wide variety of historical and contemporary sources in literature, religion, political thought, law, the visual and performing arts, and new media. Courses also examine the historical and cultural contexts in which these traditions and debates have been produced.<br><br>Majors develop two closely related skills. The first is linguistic expertise. A minimum of two years of course work in one language is required, and further work (including intensive summer language study) is greatly encouraged, because the aim is to study a cultural field through its own texts and discourses. The Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies offers courses in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman, Turkish, Hebrew, Armenian, Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu, Tamil, Swahili and Wolof.<br><br>The second skill is learning how to think and write about complex cultural formations, drawing on a variety of methods and disciplinary approaches. The approaches vary according to the faculty members' expertise, incorporating methods from relevant fields in the humanities and social sciences, such as literary criticism, film studies, cultural studies, political theory, and intellectual history.<br><br>The only difference between the MESAAS major and the concentration is that the latter does not require language proficiency.