Arabic

At Stanford, undergraduate and graduate students can work with faculty across the DLCL's comparative cluster of Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish, or choose to specialize in one or more of these literary cultures.

Arabic literature is studied in the Department of Comparative Literature, while the Arabic language is taught in the Stanford Language Center with courses that range across four years of language learning, target beginners, heritage learners, and reading for research, and interrogate media, classical, conversational, and regional registers of Arabic.

Stanford faculty across the university are working on Arabic texts and cultures, most notably in History, Religion, and Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

Students can choose to minor in Arabic, a program that involves an equal amount of literature and language courses, and they can also take courses in Arabic literature that read either original Arabic texts or English translations ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first centuries, and from ancient epic poetry to post-modern prose.

The relationships between the different genres of Arabic literature across the fifteen or so centuries of its literary history, and the infinite points of contact with Persian, Hebrew, and Turkish, make the study of Arabic particularly rewarding. Arabic is a language that opens professional, personal, and intellectual doors across the world.