Graduate Program

The admission standards and selection procedures are identical to those followed by the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for all of its MA programs (with the exception of the Liberal Studies program). Applicants must provide a 15- to 20-page writing sample, three (3) letters of recommendation from individuals familiar with their academic work and history, and optional Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores.

The deadline for the submission of fully completed applications for Fall 2024 MA class is February 8, 2024.
We do not accept applications for the spring semester.

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences prefers online applications. Apply online at gsas.columbia.edu/admissions. If you have questions about the graduate school admissions webpage, call (212) 854-4737.

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.