The RLL program was founded in 1926 as an interdepartmental Ph.D. program by the departments of French, Italian and Spanish. Until the middle 1960s the RLL degree was the only Ph.D. offered by the three departments. At some point before 1948 (the earliest date from which documentation survives), the program was structured along two tracks, one for students whose principal interest was literary, the other for students focused on philology. Later still, when the Graduate Group in Romance Philology was established, the philology track in RLL was removed and students could opt between Plan I (Literature) and Plan II (Linguistics) as they exist today.
