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