Aside from their specific fields of research, the scholars in our unit display a broad profile of expertise in transnational studies, investigating the linguistic, literary, artistic, social and political dimensions of cultural identity. These investigations take two forms—on the one hand, specifying our objects of study in a concrete culture and history; and on the other hand, locating it within interdisciplinary and comparative contexts. This commitment to interdisciplinarity and transnationalism is not a commitment in name only. Indeed, most of our faculty have zero-time or joint appointments with units across campus, and colleagues in other disciplines also have appointments in the Departmen of Spanish and Portuguese. Some of the most frequent and fruitful collaborations are with the Program in Gender & Women’s Studies, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Department of Linguistics, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Latina/Latino Studies Program, Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE), the Department of Media and Cinema Studies, the Program in Comparative and World Literature, the Program in Art History, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The necessity and intellectual utility of this kind of cross-departmental connection has been confirmed as the entire Foreign Languages Building has been incorporated into a School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics in order to facilitate precisely these kinds of interdisciplinary investigations.