Fall 2025 Courses
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES - FALL 2025
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: AFAS UN1001 - 001
Course Title: Introduction to African American Studies
Day/Time: Monday / Wednesday 2:40pm - 3:55pm
Instructor: Nyle Fort
Prerequisites: Students need to register for a section of AFAS UN1010, the required discussion section for this course.
From the arrival of enslaved Africans to the recent election of President Barack Obama, black people have been central to the story of the United States, and the Americas, more broadly. African Americans have been both contributors to, and victims of, this “New World” democratic experiment. To capture the complexities of this ongoing saga, this course offers an inter-disciplinary exploration of the development of African-American cultural and political life in the U.S. but also in relationship to the different African diasporic outposts of the Atlantic world.
The course will be organized both chronologically and thematically, moving from the “middle passage” to the present so-called “post-racial” moment—drawing on a range of classical texts, primary sources, and more recent secondary literature—to grapple with key questions, concerns, and problems (i.e. agency, resistance, culture, etc.) that have preoccupied scholars of African-American history, culture, and politics. Students will be introduced to a range of disciplinary methods and theoretical approaches (spanning the humanities and social sciences), while also attending to the critical tension between intellectual work and everyday life, which are central to the formation of African-American Studies as an academic field.
This course will engage specific social formations (i.e. migration, urbanization, globalization, etc.), significant cultural/political developments (i.e. uplift ideologies, nationalism, feminism, Pan-Africanism, religion/spirituality, etc.), and hallmark moments/movements (i.e. Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights movement, etc.). By the end of the semester, students will be expected to possess a working knowledge of major themes/figures/traditions, alongside a range of cultural/political practices and institutional arrangements, in African-American Studies.
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: UN 1002 - 001
Course Title: Major Debates - The Long Black 1980’s
Day/Time: Wednesday 12:10pm - 2:00pm
Instructor: Jafari Allen
This course will explore major debates in Black Studies from the vantage of 'the long 1980s'. While questions of Black ‘community’ inclusion and naming, representation, political strategy, and resistance, for example, have long historic genealogies; the long 1980s is distinguished by an explosion of discourses transmitted through popular and scholarly media. This course will survey a number of these— with specific attention to how a newly re-emergent ‘African American Studies’ contributed to public intellectual life, thus re-shaping itself as a feature of US Academe. Faithful to the themes of the debates of the era, we will pay particular attention to the significance of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality in Black politics, culture(s), and society— tracing how Black scholars’, critics’, and artists’ (re)conceptions of ‘articulation,’ ‘intersectionality,’ ‘Afrocentrism,’’ hegemony,’ and ‘white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy," e.g., sought to explain and contextualize contemporary popular culture, and political realities like the effects of deindustrialization and dawning of neo-liberalism, “police brutality,” AIDS, Apartheid, crack, Reagan/Thatcher, and public policies launched to address the so-called “crisis of the Black family,” for example. Beginning with a brief look at genealogies of African American and African Diaspora Studies, we will take up several of its most enduring major debates through a survey of popular and scholarly literature, social theory, film, music, ethnography, and historiography. The course will require primary independent and group research, listening, and screenings.
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: UN 3002-001
Course Title: Image Matters: Writing with photographs from the African Diaspora
Day/Time: Tuesday 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Edwidge Danticat
"How should we understand the relationship between the family, the photograph, and the African diaspora?" asks the scholar Tina M. Campt in her 2012 book Image Matters. In this course, we will examine how some African American and African diaspora writers have used photographs or collaborated with photographers in writing poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, expanding our understanding of their families, communities, and broader cultural and historical issues.
Students will "write with photographs" throughout the course and in midterm and final projects. They will develop skills in critically reading and interpreting written texts and visual imagery while exploring the intersection of literature and photography as a combined medium for storytelling and cultural expression. Students will enhance their writing skills by integrating photographs, their own and others', into their creative and analytical writing.
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: UN 3943 - 001
Course Title: Senior Pro Seminar
Day/Time: Wednesday 12:10pm - 2:00pm
Instructor: Farah J. Griffin
AFAM Majors Only
This course is a seminar for seniors to either conduct a capstone project or to begin the research process for a Senior Thesis, which will be written in the Spring semester. This interdisciplinary course provides the necessary structure needed to complete either goal. This will be an interactive class in which students are required to participate and actively engage in each meeting. The classroom is designed to be a safe, respectful space in which the feedback given and received will be constructive and will assist students in working through the issues they may be experiencing with writing. Whether students will transition to academic or nonacademic spheres, this course is designed to help students cultivate effective writing and research skills and to develop oral presentation skills.
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE - UN3930 - 002
Course Title: Freedom School
Day/Time: Monday 10:10pm - 12:00pm
Instructor: Nyle Fort
The Freedom School is an experimental praxis course where students engage the histories, theories, and practical tools of social justice organizing. Our purpose is to explore the possibilities of connecting conceptual knowledge to concrete action.
The course is rooted in a rich legacy of youth organizing popularized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer was an experiment that sought to, among other things, increase black voter registration and establish civic education in the rural south. While the effort consisted of over 40 initiatives, an educational program - Freedom Schools - endured through generations and represented a novel approach to activism. What began as an effort to educate high school students became one of the country’s largest initiatives in intergenerational community organizing as students ranged from seven to seventy years old. Freedom School courses varied from history and civics to math and foreign languages, but the fundamental lessons were deep democracy, self-determination, and grassroots leadership.
This course carries on this tradition of student and community-based activism as we confront old and new forms of racial oppression and social injustice. Throughout the semester students will have the opportunity to (1) study social movement histories and theories, (2) learn practical organizing skills, (3) engage in community-based research, (4) build relationships with local civic institutions, and (5) co-create a service learning project based in Harlem.
*An at least intermediate knowledge of and experience with social justice is highly recommended.
Course Title: Listening to Hip Hop UN3007 - 001
Day/Time: Monday 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Ellie Hisama
Born in NYC in the 1970s, hip hop has emerged as a center of scholarly inquiry in popular music and culture from within the arts, humanities, and social science. This course focuses on sound and listening, intertwined with considerations of culture, politics, and society. Music terminology and knowledge of music notation are not assumed but will be covered during the early weeks of the course in order to equip students with a language to discuss the sonic and formal aspects of hip hop.
Throughout the course, we will track key words in hip hop studies such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, politics, place, class, representation, and diaspora, focusing on recordings, videos, films, and live performance. The course will consider hip hop through multiple lenses, drawing from writers situated in popular music studies, Black studies, American Studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, women’s/gender/sexuality studies, disability studies, sociology, communications, and English. Readings will help to locate music, artists, and genres within their cultural, political, and social contexts, which in turn will assist us in our analysis of particular works. The course aims to assist you in absorbing many of the diverse strands that comprise the world of hip hop; to develop skills in hearing, viewing, thinking, and writing; and to reflect critically upon hip hop music and the discourse about it.
GRADUATE COURSES - FALL 2025
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: GU4033 - 001
Course Title: Harlem and Haiti
Day/Time: Thursday 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Edwidge Danticat
This graduate seminar explores the rich cultural and historical connections between the Harlem Renaissance in the United States and Haiti, the world's first independent Black Republic. Through an interdisciplinary approach, students will examine the linked literary, artistic, political, and social dimensions of the Harlem Renaissance and Haiti and how they have influenced and interacted with each other through their writers and artists. By analyzing key texts, novels, essays, travelogues, artworks, and historical documents, students will develop a comprehensive understanding of the connections between the Harlem Renaissance and Haiti and how they continue to resonate today. At the end of the course, students will have gained a deeper historical context, including the socio-political backgrounds and global influences that shaped and connected the Harlem Renaissance and Haiti, and will have honed the analytical and critical skills necessary to explore broader diasporic and transnational l connections.
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: GU4990 - 001
Course Title: African American Research Writing
Day/Time: Thursday 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Rachel Grace Newman
The Black experience has been studied intensively by social scientists and humanists but also explored by writers and artists. This class examines in detail the concepts and categories that have been employed to document and analyze the lives of Black peoples across the diaspora. The course surveys different traditions of research, writing, and other forms of critical examination and creative exploration. Its objective is to prepare students for the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies. The class is discussion based with weekly readings and invited guests who will share work and offer insights on their disciplinary methods in Black Studies. The course is open only to graduate and undergraduate majors in African American and African Diaspora Studies. Students will be required to write short, weekly commentaries. Over the course of the seminar students will develop a thesis prospectus, including annotated bibliography, and present the final prospectus to the class. Exceptions may be made for other students at the instructor’s discretion.
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: AFASGU4080-001
Course Title: Colonial Visual Systems: Constructing a “New World”
Day/Time: Tuesday 12:10pm - 2:00pm
Instructor: Rachel Grace Newman
This course will examine the visual organizational systems used by Europeans during their colonization of the Americas, specifically the Caribbean. These systems were used in several ways: first, to classify what Europeans had never encountered through botanical and zoological illustration, then, as tools to assert control over groups of people and land through mapping practices and ethnographic illustrations. As such, the course will examine the broad history of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and plantation visuality and surveillance beginning in the early fifteenth century and ending with contemporary questions around decolonization and methodology. The course will study how these visual systems were marshaled to create narratives that persist today, including the construction of racial hierarchies, the modern-day surveillance state, and land as kin to be protected or property to be exploited. The course emphasizes developing research skills using primary source materials to compose a convincing, inquisitive piece of writing. The main requirement will be a final 15–20-page paper and a student presentation so that each student can share their research with the class. Over the semester, we will work on developing this paper together; the goal is for students to have a paper they can use for conference presentations or even rework for publication. At the end of the course, the student will be versed in the colonial history of the Caribbean and Latin America and how visual systems developed there have functioned to construct systems of power and control.
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: AFASGU4080 - 002
Course Title: Writing and Editing the Black Studies Journal
Day/Time: Tuesday 12:10pm - 2:00pm
Instructor: Jafari Allen
Think of this as Black study research design studio in which the integrity of “an imagined moral-intellectual community” and the practicalities of journal writing and publication are held in balance.
“This is an introduction to the complex world of academic publishing and is designed to give writers in a variety of disciplines (including Black Studies) practical experience in getting their work published in peer-reviewed journals. …The goal of this course is to aid participants in taking their papers from classroom quality to journal quality and in overcoming anxiety about academic publishing in the process.
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: AFASGU4080 - 003
Course Title: "Authors of Black French Studies"
Day/Time: Monday 12:10pm-2:00pm
Instructor: Veronique Charles
In this seminar, students will be introduced to as well as expand their knowledge of influential authors, including artists, who contributed to the field of Black French Studies, in its most capacious conception. These authors represent an assemblage of thought-leaders born in French-speaking Europe or its (former) empire in addition to those who sojourned in or expatriated to these regions. A sample of texts studied in this seminar include works by Anténor Firmin, Paulette Nardal, Awa Thiam, Maboula Soumahoro, Frantz Fanon, V.Y. Mudimbe, James Baldwin, Williams Wells Brown, Ousmane Sembene, and Alice Diop. Students will consider the gains of studying these works within their historical, geo-linguistic contexts as well as the complication and paucity of translation.
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: AFASGU4080 - 004
Course Title: That’s My Song!: Musical Genre as Social Contract
Day/Time: Wednesday 12:10pm - 2:00pm
Instructor: Guthrie Ramsey
Music in American history has been fundamental to identity formation because, as one scholar notes, it comprises “the deepest feelings and qualities that make a group unique. Through moving and sounding together in synchrony, people can experience feeling of oneness with others.” This course examines how various musical genres have served as “social contracts” among audiences throughout the process of this country’s nation-building process. Within America’s melting pot ideal, communities of listeners have asserted their powerful convictions about social identity through musical praxis and its “rules of engagement.” The discourse surrounding the notion of “genre” have often made these meanings legible, audible, and powerful for many. From Protestant church performance practices, to minstrelsy, to Tin Pan Alley to rock and hip-hop, the social agreements of musical genres help us understand the dynamism of American identities in formation.
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: GR6100-001
Course Title: African American Pro Seminar
Day/Time: Wednesday 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Brandi Summers
AFAM MA Students ONLY
This course introduces students to central questions and debates in the fields of African American Studies, and it explores the various interdisciplinary efforts to address them. The seminar is designed to provide an interdisciplinary foundation and familiarize students with a number of methodological approaches. Toward this end we will have a number of class visitors/guest lecturers drawn from members of IRAAS's Core and Affiliated Faculty.
AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: GR6999-001
Course Title: Thesis Research Graduate
Instructor: Brandi Summers
AFAM MA Students ONLY