Members of the Department work to foster this understanding in their interaction with students on the Rhodes campus and in their activities as scholars, researchers, and writers. We understand these various branches of our activity--as teachers, scholars, and writers--to be overlapping and mutually informative, as our own writing and research stimulates new thinking in class, while classroom dialogue opens new avenues of inquiry. As a faculty we represent diverse areas of expertise and critical orientation, and we also understand this diversity to be central to our work. Our aim is to share with students the productive dialogue that arises out of our varied approaches, cultivating the independence of mind that can only result from rigorous and open inquiry.