New! African American and Africana Studies Courses.
AMST200
Advocating the right to financial compensation for losses has been a response to injustice among many oppressed groups. Learn about this particular approach to righting wrongs.
RACE & THE UNIVERSITY
AMST-200
How have race and institutionalized racism structured the American university? To grasp the shifts in academia, from an endeavor dominated by elite white men to one shaped by people of color, working-class people, and women, your studies will cover the Black Campus Movement, “Ivy League” slaveholding, race in college athletics and Eurocentric curricula.
RACE & GENDER IN AMER. ECONOMY
BE-110
Analyze the main economic tools used for policy, economic status, causes and cures, and discrimination. Examine government policies, some with goals affecting equal opportunity and income equality for Hispanics and African-Americans.
AFRICAN DANCE
DANCE-250
Learn the movement, rhythms and cultural context of selected dance traditions from the Old Mali Empire with live African drum accompaniment and experience a community-based ethos in class.
AFRICAN DANCE: POL. & SOCIAL INFLUENCE IN THE DIASPORA
DANC-350
Dance arts have impacted national identity in Ghana, Senegal, and Guinea through National ballets and cultural groups. Discover their ties to neo-traditional African dance in the U.S., focusing on the Phila. African Drum and Dance Community from the 1950s to the present.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITIONS
ENGL-222
Spirituals and speeches, plays and prose, folktales and film expose traditions fueled by the power of the word in African-American culture.
EARLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
ENGL 230
Read and analyze poetry, non-fiction prose narratives, speeches, novels, and historical texts from 1746 to the Civil War by Africans and their American descendants. Learn how the growth of this literature relates to colonialism, slavery, emancipation and abolition, and “the color line.”
AFRO-FUTURISM
ENGL 230
This course examines how intellectuals and artists from Africa and its diasporas variously envision the presence—or absence—of black people and blackness in “the future.” Short stories, essays, novels, and films will sample AfroFuturist artists and critics from Africa, the Caribbean, and North America from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.
GLOBAL BLACK FAMILY
ENGL230
Learn how black families in Africa, Europe, and the Americas shape lives, express values, and represent socio-cultural complexity in work by writers and filmmakers. ENGL-240 CARIBBEAN LITERATURE With its gumbo of cultures, languages, histories, and mythologies, its transatlantic struggles, and alliances, what can writers unveil about this complex region? Seek answers by discussing, presenting, and writing on folklore, poetry, fiction, drama, and film.
RACE-Y, SEXY
ENGL 250
Black Feminism and Black Queer Theory help students explore the intersections of gender, race, sex, and sexuality in the lived experiences and cultural work of black people in America.
THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
ENGL325
Study and research the Black Arts Movement, an African-American cultural force born in the mid-1960s that articulated power, blackness, resistance, and community through art.
DEATH AND THE BLACK SUBJECT
ENGL 325
Explore black historical and literary subjects’ encounters with death in three modalities: the social death of racial slavery, civil death (loss of the right to have rights), and physical mortality.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN FILM
FS-252
Learn about films made by African American filmmakers from the silent era to the present, white Hollywood’s productions of blackness, and prominent performers in black-cast musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, and ghetto action films of the 1990s.
THE FRANCOPHONE WORLD
FREN-252
Texts including fiction, historical works, and film examine 20th-century literature from former French colonies from Africa and the Caribbean, with additional material from French-speaking Canada. Students also explore colonialism and its aftermath.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY I / HIST-223 AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY II
HIST-222
Read, analyze and discuss various social movements African-Americans have initiated to pursue justice, equality, self-determination, and social transformation. Study struggles based on politics, ideology, religion, gender privilege and region, and alliances forged with other groups at home and abroad.
BIBLES, GUNS, AND MINERALS IN AFRICA
HIST-231
Get introduced to Africa through a focus on Kenya and Tanzania. The course compares and contrasts their histories with attention to settler colonies, slavery, competing cultural and economic interests, liberation struggles, and gender.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
HIST-421
Study the diversity of the African continent since 1400. Topics may include the empires of West Africa, African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, the Dutch and British Cape Colony, and the independence movements of the twentieth century.
CULTURES OF RESISTANCE
HIST-367
This course focuses on the past, present, and future of various local cultures in an age of a hegemonic global pop culture, advanced digital communication, and seemingly ever-increasing democratization of innovative technologies.
U.S. LATINO/A LITERATURE
LAS-215
Read the works of U.S. Latino and Latina authors writing in English in the United States, with a focus on political, social and economic conditions shaping the literary experiences within Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American communities.
AFRO-LATIN AMERICA
LAS 332
Explore the crucial—yet often overlooked—role of Afro-Latin Americans in shaping the region’s cultural, political, and economic developments. Analyze how explicit or implicit racial ideologies have justified the enslavement, exploitation, and marginalization of Afro-Latin Americans as well as Afro-Latin Americans’ modes of resistance.
SEX, RACE, AND SITCOMS
MCS/GWMS 319
Explore the use of race, class, and gender as comedy and social commentary in American satire, sitcoms and stand-up performance.
GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND COMMUNICATION
MCS-340
Connect theories and research on gender, ethnicity and communication to African-American culture.
HISTORY OF JAZZ
MUSC-207
Survey jazz from its African origins and African-American roots to the present. Study issues facing black artists through intensive listening assignments, weekly writing, and projects.
PHILOSOPHY OF RACE
PHIL-230
Analyze concepts of race in daily life, the sciences and the academic world from a philosophical approach that includes ethics and politics.
DEMOCRATIZATION IN AFRICA
POL-399A
Trace the development of democracy across Africa, taking stock of current trends in democratization and analyzing prospects for its increase on the continent. Themes include legal and institutional reform, corruption, civil society, and human rights, elections, and economic development.
MINORITY HEALTH & HEALTH DISPARITIES
PSYCH-475
Read, reflect, discuss, and write about health challenges and strengths of individuals from marginalized communities.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
SOC-220
Explore environmental inequality in the United States, particularly amenities and harms on the basis of race and class, who gets the environmental goods, who gets the environmental bads, and why.
RACE & ETHNIC RELATIONS
SOC-255
Have Italians always been White? Are racial differences
in illness and IQ inherited? Does race impact who we befriend and marry? SOC255 asks such questions about how race and ethnicity shape social life.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCES
SOC-258
Explore the experiences of African Americans in the U.S., both the historical context of Black life and many contemporary issues such as race and discrimination.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMALE PLAYWRIGHTS
THEA-250
Explore forms, themes, language, and characters from plays by groundbreakers Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan-Lori Parks & others