Africana Studies

Critical approaches to better conceptualize and engage with the complex and distinctive experiences, lives, and contributions of peoples of African descent.

The Africana Studies program offers:

Majors

Minors

Students of Africana Studies experience alternative epistemological approaches, theories, and paradigms that enable them to better conceptualize, explain, and incorporate the contemporary interests and concerns of the majority of the world’s peoples and their societies.

Featured course

Jump to level: All Africana Studies courses

by level: 100 • 200 • 300 • 400

AFS 264 Education for Social Change
This course explores how schooling has made us the people that we are today, and asks if formal education has prepared us for the challenges that we face in this age of globalization. The course assaults the status quo nature of education and challenges us to imagine a pedagogy that is central to social change.
AFS 280 African American English: Language in Black and White
Investigation of the variety of English referred to as African American English (or Ebonics) with specific focus on the following areas: grammatical structure, pragmatics, history, and educational issues.
AFS 331 Africana Intellectual History
Exploration of the evolution, links, and applications of black thought in the Atlantic World. Efforts toward political, economic, and social change in the African Diaspora are examined through the lenses of various ideologies and historical contexts, such as black emancipation and nationalist movements, black and African feminism, and global expansion of hip hop culture.

 

Our distinguished faculty’s publications

Prof. McKinley E. Melton, Paxton Endowed Teaching Chair, Associate Professor of English, and chair of the Advisory Board for Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center dedicated to Black Poetry, is proud to announce the launch of the #FuriousFlowerSyllabus: Opening the World of Black Poetry. Dr. Melton, in collaboration with the Furious Flower Advisory Board, facilitated a gathering of more than 20 scholars, poets, and educators from across the country to create syllabi, unit plans, lesson plans, classroom exercises, assignments, and organized lectures, culminating in a more than 125-page interactive document that features 150 acclaimed poets.

News

Events

The Africana Studies program co-sponsors the Annual Derrick K. Gondwe Memorial Lecture on Social and Economic Justice in the fall of every academic year. The lecture is in its 14th year. Learn more about Derrick K. Gondwe.