The Faculty is one of the leading centres for the study of European language, literature, and culture world-wide, offering expertise in the entire chronological range from the earliest times to the present day, and with specialists in film studies, cultural studies, history of the book, and cultural history as well as languages and literatures. The Faculty offers expertise in Celtic (Welsh and Irish), French, German, Italian, Modern Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish and Czech, as well as in a range of other languages spoken in Europe. Colleagues across the various languages work together in various interdisciplinary projects and research centres, which bring specialists in language and literature together with historians, philosophers, and social studies scholars.

The Faculty is partly college-based, and partly housed in University buildings in Wellington Square, where some academic staff and the Faculty’s administrative staff have offices, and at the Taylor Institution in St Giles’ where some teaching takes place and the main Faculty and research library is based. The Taylor Institution, a fine nineteenth-century building sharing with the Ashmolean Museum a commanding site on St Giles’, contains both the Taylorian Library, the largest and best resourced Modern Languages library in the country, and the Faculty’s largest teaching rooms. Modern Languages at Oxford has been ranked top in the world in the last two QS World University rankings.

The Faculty is divided into seven sub-faculties: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and other Slavonic Languages, Spanish and Modern Greek. It includes 11 established professorships as well as 15 individuals with the title of professor and 80 permanent academic post holders. The colleges, which are responsible for undergraduate admissions and undergraduate tutorial teaching, admit a total of about 270 students a year to read for the Honour School of Modern Languages and its joint schools with Classics, English, History, Philosophy, Oriental Studies, and Linguistics. The Modern Languages Faculty Board is responsible for the admission and supervision of graduate students. There are about 50 graduates taking taught Masters degrees, and about 120 research students.