The University of Chicago has long been a haven for scholars seeking to draw, redraw, or erase the boundaries between disciplines, and this adventurousness is evident in the way our faculty and students come together as well. It began in 1932 with the rubric of "Group Studies in the Humanities," an interdisciplinary program divided into language, literature, and history of culture, then grew with the rise of area studies after World War II, and the consequent growing appreciation of Chicago's important role in the internationalization of education from the 1950s onward. The sheer proximity of so many types of knowledge and languages (both taught and spoken) has made the interdisciplinary center a defining feature of the University of Chicago and the Division of the Humanities.