Graduate Program

African American Studies by its very nature is an interdisciplinary field. It acquaints the student with myriad ways of thinking (historical, sociological, literary, quantitative analysis), researching, and writing about the diverse experiences of African Americans in the United States and of African descended people throughout the African Diaspora (from dispersion, colonialism, the slave trade and slavery, through emancipation, decolonization, independence, and postcolonialism). African American Studies brings together the voluminous scholarship generated by past and present historians; political scientists; sociologists; cultural, literary, and performance studies critics; and scholars working on diverse topics and constructions of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

The Department of African American Studies is comprised of renowned core faculty and faculty affiliates who are integrally involved in the teaching, service, and research interests of the department. Affiliated faculty members are invited, and in fact expected, to be key participants in African American Studies. Both our core and affiliated faculty have appointments in the following Northwestern University schools: Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Communication, Human Development and Social Policy, the Law School, the School of Music, and the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. This involvement of affiliates positions us well to mobilize their active support and engagement for the graduate program in African American Studies. Affiliated faculty stand poised to assist with graduate teaching by cross-listing their current graduate course offerings; to serve on the examination and dissertation committees of our students; and to participate on administrative committees related to the graduate program such as in-house competitive fellowships, admissions, and program governance.

The Department offers advanced graduate training through a PhD in African American Studies. Three substantive areas form the basis of this program: 1. Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies; 2. Histories; 3. Politics, Society, and Culture. Each of these areas is populated by scholars within the department who focus their research within a domestic and/or international context. The Ph.D. program in African American Studies provides students with the historical background in the experiences of people of African descent, the analytic preparation to carry out rigorous empirical research, and the professional development to pursue careers in academia or beyond.

Students who have completed either the B.A. or M.A. degree may apply to the Ph.D. program in African American Studies. While there are plans to mount a terminal master's program in the near future, no such program exists at present.

Traditionally the social sciences and humanities have found their subject matter within the contours of the western nation-state system and the European and American lineage of western history and philosophy. The first wave of intellectual developments in Black Studies and African American Studies from the 1960s onwards challenged the neglect and exclusion of critical analyses of Atlantic slavery, western colonialism and American racism; and facilitated research in the expressive traditions of Black cultural and political movements and the racial dynamics of contemporary social life and public policy. This was an extremely important period of nation-centered and historiographic scholarship, opening up new fields of sustained inquiry, and underwriting the longevity and vitality of the African American intellectual tradition. Consequently, over the last 40 years African American Studies with its emphasis on national intellectual inclusiveness and critique has to a considerable extent influenced, if not transformed, the epistemologies and methodologies of the social sciences and humanities in the US. At the same time, the scholarship produced by African American Studies has been disseminated through a dynamic transnational circuit of intellectuals, literary movements and knowledge production across the urban centers of Latin America, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe.

However, since the last decade of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, African American Studies like many inter-disciplines spanning the social sciences and humanities, is becoming more responsive to, and influenced by, a contemporary world that is increasingly interdependent and subject to diverse representations and questionings. The world is no longer centered, if indeed it ever was, on the singular cultures of self-enclosed or autonomous nations. The multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith
and gendered dimensions of national spaces and histories are accelerating to prominence under the influence of economic
and cultural forms of globalization. Intellectual orientations are increasingly being underwritten and overwritten by questions
of trans-nationalism and deterritorialization. Currently we are experiencing a new wave of diaspora-centered African American Studies where greater emphases on diversity and inter-disciplinarity are assuming greater prominence in dialogue with the changing complexity of the modern world. The latest developments in African American Studies are contributing to a new wave of intellectual and intercultural developments which are symptomatic of the changing vicissitudes of the world, where the recognition of worldly interdependence, cultural diversity and academic interdisciplinarity are now indispensable for the production of knowledge in the 21st century. In this context our PhD program is very much a part of and contributes to this new wave of African American Studies, oriented both to the historical world that produced the African diaspora as well as to the contemporary world that continues to be shaped by the politics, popular cultures and social movements of Black populations.

African American Studies in the 21st century is a dynamic field characterized by a history of interdisciplinarity to develop new forms of intellectual work that arise because of trends towards interdependency and multilateralism within and across nations, particularly throughout the African diaspora. The scholarship of African American Studies is poised to respond and contribute to the intellectual debates that arise from these trends. It also provides for the continued development and expansion of fields of inquiry that explore the formation and intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. The PhD program in African American Studies is led by faculty with diverse interests in the histories, experiences, and cultures of people of African descent around the world. This is reflected in the depth and range of our scholarship as well as the courses we currently offer (and those we will mount in the future).

The department is allied closely with other departments and programs within the university, including Anthropology, African Studies, American Studies, Art History, Asian American Studies, Comparative Literary Studies, English, Gender Studies, History, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and others. African American Studies PhD students may earn a graduate certificate in Gender Studies and in African Studies.

The Department of African American Studies' administrative offices and faculty offices are housed respectively in the interconnected buildings of Kresge Cenntinniel Hall and Crowe Hall. The department shares these buildings with the Department of Philosophy, the Department of French & Italian, the Program in African & Asian Languages, the Program in Gender Studies, the Department of Spanish & Portugese, the Department of German, and the Department of Art History among others.

General information on graduate study at Northwestern University is available at The Graduate School website .