The Department of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M focuses on a general area of excellence entitled Hispanic Intellectual History/Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. Core areas of concentration include Poetics, Thought, and Visual and Digital Studies. We understand our educational mission to be the formation of students, both undergraduate and graduate, at the highest level of professional competence in the field. While our students are given the means and expected to develop fluency in and knowledge of the Spanish language, our curriculum and profile are based, not exclusively, on intensive preparation in Hispanic Visual Culture, Artistic and Literary Poetics, and Hispanic Thought. Additionally, we have strong concentrations on Golden Age Studies, Mexican and Mexican American Literature, Linguistics, Spanish Cultural Studies, and the Spanish and Latin American novel. Our undergraduate program is interdisciplinary and open to the study of history, anthropology, politics, and philosophy. Our interdisciplinary graduate program, joint with Texas A&M International University and Texas A&M Kingsville, offers the possibility of extracurricular working groups on contemporary political thought, digital humanities, psychoanalysis and culture, poetics and new media, and documentary studies, with a special emphasis on Hispanic life in the US Southwest and on US/Mexico Border Studies. We have established cooperation and exchange programs with Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, in Spain, and Universita di Salerno, in Italy. We have study abroad programs in Barcelona and Mexico. We are committed to the comparative study of the intellectual history of Spain, Latin America, and the US Southwest, and believe that the unique opportunity of engaging with Hispanic Studies in Texas offers extraordinary ways of understanding the civilizational encounter of two of the most powerful and interesting cultures of world modernity - an encounter whose impact on North American life will prove decisive in coming decades.