Italian Studies at Brown teaches language and literature to its students. Rather than merely confirming a fixed canon or predetermined field of study, however, the department guides student research toward problems that are cross-disciplinary in both content and method. To investigate these problems, we can draw at Brown on traditional alliances with Anthropology, Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, History, Musicology, and Philosophy, but we also join forces with disciplines such as History of Science, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies. Since the mid-1990s our department has been at the forefront of experimentation in the Digital Humanities.