Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institute of Romance Studies

Institute of Romance Studies

With almost one billion native speakers in all continents, Romance languages represent the most diverse cultures of the world and a huge variety of social contexts. Together with their ancestor Latin, they cover almost three thousand years of written documentation. Who aims at working and researching in this broad field can skip from language history and linguistic structures through the critical reading of literary classics like Chanson de Roland, Divine Comedy, and Don Quixote up to the reflection on the development of contemporary cultures in filmmaking, digital media or multilingualism in foreign language teaching.

Every facet of this world is investigated and taught by us: welcome to one of the longest established institutes of romance studies in Germany, witness of an eventful history. Supported by a staff of more than 40 collaborators and 9 different courses our Institute supplies the possibility either to investigate the French, Italian and Spanish languages, literatures, and cultures or to approach the Catalan, Portuguese and Romanian ones.

The possibility of changing our views offered by dealing with the Romance languages, literatures and cultures is represented in a playful and creative way by the maps-collages “As jangadas de pedra”, which illustrate our internet pages and put the scattered parts of Romania together in a surprising way.