Graduate Program

The MA (Free Standing) in African American Studies at Columbia is a 30-credit interdisciplinary program that will support your scholarly interests and research in the African-American experience and in the cultures and histories of the wider African Diaspora. Our program is organized to provide you with the opportunity and flexibility to design a program of study and a thesis project that addresses your intellectual interests and career ambitions.

The capstone of your degree is your thesis. Your thesis topic will be developed in concert with a member of our faculty, who will work closely with you during the course of your tenure at Columbia. Typically, the faculty member you request as your thesis advisor will be an instructor with whom you have taken a course and who shares an interest and expertise in your thesis topic. During your final semester, you will enroll in a thesis-writing workshop and work closely with your thesis advisor. The thesis workshop allows all thesis writers to share their work, receive guidance and feedback from your peers as well as the workshop leader. Your thesis advisor also will advise you during the course of this semester toward the completion of your MA thesis.

In addition to completing your thesis, there are four further requirements:

You must take four required seminars: Total (12 points) -
Must Be Graduate Courses (4000 level or above)
You can not take Undergraduate courses.

1. African American Studies Pro-Seminar (4 points)
2. Research and Writing Seminar (4 points)
3. Thesis / Practicum Research (4 points)

• The successful completion of a Master's Thesis or Final Project.

A distribution requirement – 3 Courses: Must Be Graduate Courses

• One course in history;
• One course in the humanities (e.g., literature, theater or the visual arts)
• One course in the social sciences (e.g., political science, sociology or anthropology)
• This will fulfill your distribution requirement.
• These courses can be taken within the department or outside the department.

3 courses @ 4 points = 12 points

Total: 24 points

AND

A concentration requirement – 2 Courses:  Must Be Graduate Courses

In consultation with the director of Graduate Studies and your MA thesis advisor, you will identity TWO (2) graduate courses that address your intellectual focus and your proposed thesis topic. This concentration or cluster of courses can reflect, for example, a topical focus (e.g., women novelist of the French Caribbean) or a disciplinary focus (e.g., 19th century African American historiography). In short, your concentration will be designed to express your specific intellectual interests.

2 courses @ 3 points = 6 points

Total: 30 points to (fulfill GSAS Requirements)

***Note: Students are NOT allowed to take undergraduate courses toward the M.A. Degree, any undergraduate courses taken will NOT count toward the M.A. Degree Requirements***

MA Thesis / Final Project Presentation: After you have completed your MA Thesis/Final Project, and it has been approved by your thesis advisor, you are required to present a summary of your thesis/final project  at our annual Student Conversations. This oral presentation, supported by your MA thesis advisor, will occur during your last semester of study.

For question on our MA Program contact the department at [email protected].

There are two tracks through the African American and African Diaspora Studies MA program: free-standing and sequential. Sequential students have applied and are admitted as potential candidates for the MPhil and PhD degrees. Free standing students are admitted as candidates for the MA (Free Standing) degree only.

Free standing MA students who wish to apply to the MPhil/PhD program may submit a new application through GSAS Admissions. Acceptance to the doctoral program is competitive and not guaranteed.

For question on our MA Program contact the department at [email protected].

GRADUATE COURSES - FALL 2025

AFRICAN AMERICAN AND AFRICAN DIASPORA STUDIES: GU4033-001
Course Title: Harlem and Haiti 
Day/Time:  Thursday  2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
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  2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
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 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
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 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
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 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
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 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
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  2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
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
 

African American Studies GU4080 - Section 001
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE:  The Writing in the Presence of Ancestors
Call Number: 10690  Points: 4
Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Edwidge Danticat

Note: Open to junior and seniors

"(I)t seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what the writer does with the presence of an ancestor...How the Black writer responds to that presence interests me."
Toni Morrison, "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," 1984

When Alice Walker went "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," 1975, she embarked on a quest for a literary ancestor, an artist, and creator, who, as Toni Morrison writes in "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," 1984, is "of the tribe and in it." Who are these "timeless people" we call our ancestors? What stories, traditions, and wisdom have they passed on to help us better understand ourselves and each other? What is our role in preserving their stories? How might they inspire us to tell our own? Using the essays "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" and "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" as starting points, this graduate seminar explores the intricate relationship between writers and scholars and their literary ancestors who are also, at times, mentors and friends. We examine how they have delved into the lives and the works of their chosen literary ancestors, using scholarly analysis, personal reflections, memoir, travelogue, and other creative methods to probe, honor, challenge, and expand our view and understanding of their predecessors

African American Studies GU4080 - Section 002
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: Writing and Editing the Black Studies Journal
Call Number: 10694  Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday,  2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Jafari S. Allen

Note: Open to junior and seniors

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. (Laura Belcher, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks).

“[J]ournal work is not only not an arbitrary undertaking, and it is certainly not simply the practice of putting competent scholarly articles into print (though that is avowedly its formal function); rather, it is distinctive for being an intellectual undertaking that is pursued with a certain horizon in mind, namely, the collective constitution of an imagined moral-intellectual community.” (David Scott, Small Axe 50 July 2016)

The goal of this course is twofold: (1) In this writing-for-publication workshop course, graduate students will revise and submit for publication an original seminar paper, thesis, or conference paper, , in community-- closely following Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (second edition, 2019). Moreover, we will undertake a critical survey of the field of Black Studies (both as an autonomous field, and Black Studies within what Mary Patillo has called “unidisciplines”) through close reading of its journals.

Facilitating reflexive, critically engaged, and sustainable writing practices; and focusing on the past and future of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; our hybrid colloquy sessions will typically combine theoretical and methodological discussions, close readings of assigned journals, and ‘workshop’ elements— including sharing of work-in-progress and occasional short in class writing. We will meet in-person and virtually. Small group work will be required.

African American Studies GU4080 - Section 003
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE:   Reading W.E.B DuBois
Call Number: 10697  Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday,  12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
Instructor: Vivaldi Jean-Marie

Note: Open to junior and seniors

It is undeniable that W.E.B. DuBois’s extensive corpus engages with most socio-political, cultural, aesthetic, and religious aspects that define African Americans’ ontology. The ambition of this course is to read a selection of DuBois’s texts critically and in-depth. This critical reading of DuBois’s selected texts aims to show that W.E.B. DuBois was carrying out a social engineering agenda for African Americans from post-emancipation to becoming Black Americans. Secondly, that DuBois’s lifelong musings and writings about the experiences of African Americans have managed to frame African American people’s experiences as topics of sociological investigation.

DuBois’s genius grasped that defining African Americans as a distinct people required that their experiences be studied as topics of sociological investigation. Also, the course will elaborate how DuBois’s invention of the concept of the talented tenth was the apex of his relentless advancement of education as the social lift for African Americans. Lastly, the reading of DuBois’s selected texts will show that DuBois introduced the literary genre for African Americans’ inner life articulation by means of his concept of the ‘souls’ of Black folk. And that in DuBois’s mind, “soul” stands as the intersection of African Americans’ spirituality, oppression, communal and aesthetic experiences.

African American Studies GU4080 - Section 004
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: 
Call Number: 15618  Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday, 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Anthony Johnson

Note: Open to junior and seniors

This course will introduce students to the methods and practices of ethnographers on black life in urban settings. The goal of the course is to introduce students to ethnography as a methodology to understand and critically examine Black urban populations. Through readings of anthropological literature and other disciplinary texts, we will pay particular attention to the historical, cultural, social, economic, and political contexts that shape urban experiences for Black communities throughout the globe. We examine topics including food justice, post-colonial economies, environmental justice, and abolition to name a few of the topics critically engaged by scholars of black urban communities and the social forces that affect every day lived experiences.

The course will cover a range of geographic locations including U.S. cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, while also examining critical discussions of black urban life in Brazil, and Jamaica. We will closely examine how authors consider social formations in urban contexts, and the intersections of race, class, and gender. We will also explore how authors critique social forces that shape and inform the daily lives of black urban populations. The goal of the course is to better understand how ethnography can be used to critique and add depth to commonly held understandings of black cultural practices or representations.

African American Studies GU4080 - Section 005
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: Black Mourning in America
Call Number: 15626  Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday, 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Nyle Fort

Note: Open to junior and seniors

Black grief does not begin or end at the funeral service. African Americans have and continue to remember, honor, and avenge the dead through music, storytelling, fashion, family traditions, religious rituals, protest, activism, and more. This course examines this long tradition of black mourning in America. Conceptually, it covers scholarship that speaks broadly to questions of loss, racial violence, black suffering, premature death, and collective resistance. Practically, it considers the cultural and political implications of funerals and eulogies; black museums and street memorials; the activism of bereaved mothers; recent protests against police killings; and invocations of the dead in electoral politics. Taken together, this course might interest students who are excited to learn about rituals, memorialization, museums, African American religion, policing, abolition, social movements, and the black radical tradition. 

African American Studies GU4080 - Section 006
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: The African American Prophetic Political Tradition
Call Number: 17396  Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday 2:10 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Instructor: Obery Hendricks

Note: Open to junior and seniors

The classical prophetic political tradition derives from the biblical prophets who, with strong words, courageous deeds and abiding faith in the righteousness of their cause, struggled to transform oppressive, exploitive regimes of power into just and equitable political institutions that would “let justice roll down as water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” For millennia this tradition has been a touchstone for peoples throughout the world in their struggles for freedom.

This course will explore the particular role of the prophetic political tradition in the ongoing struggle of African Americans for political equity and justice. Its purview will range from the earliest days of the American republic to the close of the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist eras. Persons and movement that will be considered include the [???] poems of Phyllis Wheatley; David Walker’s revolutionary Appeal; Frederick Douglass and the abolition movement; the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington; modes of black political resistance during the Reconstruction period; the radical historiography of W. E. B. DuBois; Ethiopianism in the nineteenth century black church; Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching movement; A. Phillip Randolph and radical labor politics; historically black religious denominations and cults (including African Methodism, the Nation of Islam and the Shrine of the Black Madonna); Adam Clayton Powell’s radical legislative agenda; Black Liberation Theology; Martin Luther King, Ella Baker and the Civil Rights movement; Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts movement; and the prophetic literary expressions of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

African American Studies GU4080 - Section 008
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: “Black Studies x French Studies” 
Call Number: 17398  Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday 12:10 p.m. - 2 p.m.
Instructor: Veronique Charles

How might an increase understanding of the lived experiences of blackness in French-language worlds and the development of Black Thought therein enrich our approach to African Diaspora Studies? “Black Studies x French Studies” is an advanced seminar where students will read both canonical and lesser-studied works in Black Studies that emerged from French-language contexts. Through lectures, readings, films, and the use of Columbia’s collection, we will discuss important texts and themes in the contemporary (re)formation of Black French Studies as a field of inquiry. Students will consider the gains of reading works of Black French Studies within their historical, geo-linguistic contexts as well as the complication and paucity of translation. Proficiency in French is an advantage but not a requirement.

African American Studies GR6999 - Section 001
THESIS RESEARCH-GRADUATE
Call Number:  TBD Points: 4
Instructor: Brandi T. Summers

Note: AFAM masters students ONLY

African-American Studies GU4080 section 009
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: BLACK POETICS: WRITING IN THE WAKE OF BLACK STUDY
Call Number 18923
Day/Time: Tuesdays, 4:10pm - 6:00pm
Instructor: Samiya Bashir

This workshop invites writers at all levels—from curious beginners to seasoned poets—to explore the intertwined practices of Black poetics and Black study. We will explore how Black writers and thinkers have used poetry as a radical space for inquiry, resistance, and liberation. Together, we’ll engage poetry as both a creative act and a method of inquiry—a way of asking questions, holding conversations, and imagining new worlds.

Participants will experiment with how their own poetry can engage the practices of Black study. Through a combination of close readings, creative writing exercises, and collaborative workshops, we’ll trace the poetics of Black study across time, engaging with the works of Black poets and theorists like Phillis Wheatley, Lucille Clifton, M. NourbeSe Philip, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Christina Sharpe, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and contemporary luminaries like Terrance Hayes, Dionne Brand, Tracy K. Smith, Claudia Rankine, and Danez Smith. We’ll consider how their poetic forms emerge from and respond to histories of displacement, protest, and the radical possibilities of collectivity.

This workshop is more than a space to write; it’s a space to reckon. How can your work converse with history, theory, and community? How does it resist and respond to systemic silencing? How do our own poems participate in Black study? How can they interrogate systems of power while building worlds rooted in joy, love, and freedom? Should they? Participants will craft new work that reflects these inquiries, blending the personal and the political, the experimental and the ancestral. We’ll also look beyond the page, considering how performance, music, and visual art intersect with our work.

This workshop is a space for exploration, reflection, and bold creation. Whether you’re just beginning to experiment with poetry or looking to push your craft further, this class offers tools and frameworks for writing poems that engage history, theory, and community. Come as you are—whether you’re stepping into poetry for the first time or refining your voice—and leave with a deeper understanding of Black poetics and its capacity to shape, challenge, and expand how we imagine freedom through the written word.