UNDERGRADUATE COURSES - SPRING 2027
African American and African Diaspora Studies 3005UN Section 001
Title: Introduction to Caribbean Art
Call Number: 14760 Points: 3
Day/Time: Monday 2:40pm – 3:55pm
Instructor: Rachel Grace Newman
This course introduces students to Caribbean art and visual culture, from the twelfth century through the colonial period to the contemporary moment in the region and its diasporas. We study how artists and communities have represented, contested, and transformed the forces that have shaped Caribbean life: indigenous reverence, colonialism, enslavement, plantation economies, migration, revolutions, and struggles for self-liberation. Topics include Indigenous Taíno, Kalinago, and Garifuna traditions, sites, and entities, European representations of the Caribbean, the transatlantic slave trade, maroon communities, the Haitian Revolution, Asian migration, photography, carnival, and the arts of Afro-Caribbean religious traditions, including Vodou, Santería, Palo Monte, and the Abakuá.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 3009UN Section 001
Title: Freedom School
Call Number: 16542 Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday 12:10pm – 2:00pm
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.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 3940UN Section 001
Title: Senior Thesis Seminar
Call Number: 16545 Points: 4
Day/Time: Tuesday 4:10pm – 6:00pm
Instructor: Kellie Jones
The Senior Seminar will afford thesis writers the chance to workshop their idea, conduct research and/or interviews, work with the IRB protocols (if necessary), learn to work with archival materials, and perform other research activities prior to writing the thesis. Students who choose to write a capstone paper or conduct a capstone project can choose an elective course the following semester. The Thesis Seminar, conducted in the spring semester, is a workshop-oriented course for Senior Thesis writers organized around honing their writing skills while providing guidance to students in their field/disciplinary-specific projects. For example, a student may choose to write a historical biography of an artist while another may pursue a sociological study of the effects of mass incarceration on voting rights. The instructor of the Thesis Seminar, working with a faculty adviser (dependent on the specific field of inquiry in the thesis), will provide feedback and supervise the writing schedule of the students.
GRADUATE COURSES - SPRING 2027
African American and African Diaspora Studies 4002GU - Section 001
Title: Writing in the Presence of Ancestors
Call Number: 14657 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday 4:10pm – 6:00pm
Instructor: Edwidge Danticat
"It 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 " 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 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 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 and African Diaspora Studies 4004GU- Section 001
Title: Turn the TV Off: Black Performance Studies
Call Number: 13639 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Instructor: Johanna F. Almiron
In this seminar, students will learn how to interpret Black Performance through historical, social, and political theory. In studying Black Performance, students will engage strategies of subversion and resistance to dominant ideologies throughout the African diaspora. With a focus on the blues and its other-worldly iterations, we will cover theorists and topics from the Black Radical tradition such as Zora Neale Hurston and American South gothic folklore; Amiri Baraka and the blues; Greg Tate and hip-hop; bell hooks and queering the Black gaze; Fred Moten and abstraction; Angela Davis and imagining abolition, and more. We will pair theory with praxis by engaging masterpieces by Black performing artists in music, dance, comedy, theatre, as well as film and television.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 4006GU - Section 001
Title: The African American Prophetic Political Tradition from David Walker to Barack Obama
Call Number: 13073 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Instructor: Obery Hendricks
The classical prophetic political tradition derives from biblical prophets like Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah who, with strong words, courageous deeds and abiding faith in the righteousness of their causes, 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 seek to understand the role of the biblical prophetic political tradition in the ongoing struggle of African Americans for political equity and justice in America. Our exploration will range from David Walker’s revolutionary early nineteenth century Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World to the racial claims and counter claims in our contemporary moment.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 4018GU - Section 002
Title: I, too, Dream of America: Race, Gender & Justice. Note: Awaiting COI Final Approval
Call Number: 14726 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Instructor: Zinga A. Fraser
This class examines the historical construction of race, gender (in particular those within the African diaspora) and how the theorization of these differences contributes to certain lived experiences within the United States. With the United States as our primary canvas, weekly readings examine the lived experiences and ideological debates among African American and those throughout the Black diaspora as they operate within: nation states; legislatures, neighborhoods; prisons; marketplaces; social and political organizations and educational institutions. Particular attention is focused on systemic biases embedded in housing, criminal justice, medicine, and economic structures. Interwoven throughout the course are the narratives of individuals and groups who participated in grassroots organizations, social movements and civic associations. Some of the thematic issues explored are: Prison industrial complex; medicine, educational inequality; feminism and Black feminism; environmental injustice, voter suppression; criminalization of Black women and girls. Interpreting both the patterns and evolution of race relations in the U.S., students develop a critical lens from which to observe and interpret contemporary debates over structural/ institutional impediments. Additionally, students are also asked to explore practical solutions to the contemporary issues explored throughout the course.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 4020GU – Section 001
Title: A Reading of W.E.B. DuBois Selected Texts Note: Awaiting COI Final Approval
Call Number: TBA Points: 4
Day/Time: Wed 10:10am – 12:00pm
Instructor: Vivaldi Jean-Marie
It is undeniable that W.E.B. DuBois’s extensive corpus engages with most of the socio-political, cultural, aesthetic, and religious aspects that define African Americans’ ontology—lived experiences. The ambition of this course is to read a selection of DuBois’s texts critically and in-depth. The deep and critical reading of DuBois’s selected texts aims to show, first, that W.E.B. DuBois’s project was carrying out a socio-cultural engineering agenda for African Americans from post-emancipation towards becoming Black Americans. Secondly, the lectures of the course explore how DuBois’s lifelong musings and writings about the various facets of the experiences of African Americans have managed to frame African American people’s experiences as topics of sociological investigation specifically rendering the complex data sets of social, cultural, economic, and religious experiences of African Americans scientifically transparent to prominent American institutions.
DuBois’s genius grasped that defining citizenship for African Americans as a distinct people, in virtue of their African heritage, required that their experiences be studied as topics of sociological investigations. 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 dominant component of American citizenship and the key social lift towards African Americans’ collective improvement. Lastly, the reading of DuBois’s selected texts will draw out that DuBois pioneered the literary genre for African Americans’ inner life articulation by means of his concept of the soul of Black folk. And that in DuBois’s mind, soul, as an indivisible entity which permeates and communes every component of African Americans’ experiences, encapsulates the intersection of African Americans’ spirituality, racist oppression, communal, and aesthetic experiences.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 4021GU - Section 001
Title: Sound Proof: Black Music’s American Journey from the Civil War to Civil Rights
Call Number: 16541 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Instructor: Guthrie Ramsey
This lecture and discussion course explores aspects of the origins, style development, aesthetic philosophies, historiography, and contemporary conventions of African American musical traditions. Topics covered include: the music of West and Central Africa, the music of colonial America, 19th-century church and dance music, minstrelsy, musical theater, music of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, blues, gospel, hip-hop, and film music. Special attention is given to the ways that Black music produces “meaning” and to how the social energy circulating within it articulates myriad issues about American identity at specific historical moments. The course will also engage other expressive art forms from visual and literary sources in order to better position music-making within the larger framework of African American aesthetics.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 4022GU - Section 001
Title: Prison, Politics, and the Pursuit of Freedom
Call Number: 16543 Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday 12:10pm – 2:00pm
Instructor: Nyle Fort
This course explores and examines the history and politics of the carceral state; theories of freedom and unfreedom; and the writings of political prisoners, with an emphasis on the long movement for the abolition - not only of prisons and punishment - but of a world that needs prisons and punishment. Conceptually, it covers intellectual work that speaks broadly to questions of confinement, freedom, and abolition. And practically, it considers how the tradition of abolitionist and anti-prison organizing and activism can help us confront ongoing legacies of injustice and struggle toward a liberated world.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 4023GU - Section 001
Title: Paule Marshall
Call Number: 16893 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday 2:10pm – 4:00pm
Instructor: Farah Griffin & Edwidge Danticat
This seminar serves as an introduction to and an in-depth exploration of the writings of Paule Marshall. We examine Marshall’s work through her novels, memoirs, and essays, focusing on the Caribbean and the broader African diaspora.
By the end of the course, students should be able to: Identify major themes and narrative strategies across Marshall’s novels and nonfiction writing. Examine the historical, cultural, and biographical contexts that inform Marshall’s writing including ways that Marshall’s work engages African American, Caribbean, and broader diasporic literary traditions. Employ close reading strategies to analyze Marshall’s prose style and narrative voice.
Assess how interviews, memoir, and critical writing contribute to students’ understanding of Marshall's literary practice and legacy. Design and produce a midterm and final project that demonstrates the capacity to critically engage literary texts, build and sustain an argument and offer an original perspective on Marshall’s body of work.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 5000GR – Section 001
Title: AFAM Thesis Research Tutorial (SQ) Note: Awaiting COI Final Approval
Call Number: TBD Points: 4
Day/Time: Independent Study Course
Instructor: Varies
Required for all first-year PhD students in the Sequential MA track, the Thesis Research Tutorial guides students through the conceptualization, primary research, drafting, and revision of an original 30–40-page Master’s Essay in African American and African Diaspora Studies. Taken alongside the required first-year core colloquium Research Methods in AAADS, this individualized tutorial enables students to translate interdisciplinary theories and cross-border methodologies—including diaspora, transnational, migration, and social movement frameworks—into a sustained, article-length scholarly argument. Working in regular consultation with a primary faculty advisor with subject-matter expertise, students refine a focused research question, engage primary archival, textual, or empirical sources, and produce a polished essay that fulfills the thesis requirement for the en-route Master of Arts degree.
African American and African Diaspora Studies 6102GR - Section 001
Title: AFAM Research Methods
Call Number: 16544 Points: 4
Day/Time: Tuesday 10:10 – 12:00pm
Instructor: Jafari Allen
This course introduces key methods, practices and modes of Black Studies. The course will consider both the history of the field of Black Studies from its disciplinary origins in the turbulent Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and the longer arc of scholars studying the lives of Black peoples in the diaspora and African continent. It will be important to understand how Blackness is placed as both peripheral to the western episteme, outside of what Hegel called the “Theater of History,” as well as central to its discursive imaginings of the universals of nation, race, capitalism, aesthetics, society and the human. In response to this epistemic challenge, the class will explore the interdisciplinary modalities of the field that draw from a range of archival, historiographic, ethnographic, analytical, qualitative, and creative methods, particularly attentive to how and why works in Black Studies often combine two or more of the aforementioned methods.
African American and African Diaspora Studies GR6999 - Section 001
Title: Thesis Research - Graduate
Call Number: 16549 Points: 1-4
Day/Time: Independent Study Course
Instructor: Brandi Summers