Our courses draw on literature, philosophy, history and many other disciplines to examine African, African-American and Caribbean/Latin American themes. We also study the social construction of racial differences and its relation to the perpetuation of racism and racial domination.
Our majors begin by studying the central debates and problems within our field. They go on to take courses on various Black cultures and to examine the links among them.
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Students explore topics such as gender and class issues in diasporic literature; international hip hop dance culture; the use of statistical models in predicting the spread of AIDS in Africa; and representations of Black children in picture books.
From our College Archives
Founded in the early 1970s in response to student protests and demands, we explore issues of race and the cultural connections between Africa and the Black diaspora. (Pictured: Amherst's first black faculty member, Professor James Q. Denton.)
From our College Archives
Our majors go on to careers in education, business, medicine, law and other fields in which an understanding of racial and cultural differences is important. Many complete graduate programs at top national research institutions.
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Each year, through the Charles Hamilton Houston Scholar-in-Residence program, we invite an important intellectual in the field to campus for a week to deliver a lecture, direct a faculty seminar and participate in the intellectual life on campus.
This interdisciplinary course combines teaching of the field’s foundational texts with instruction in reading and writing, to prepare you for advancement in Black studies and other humanities and social sciences.
Examine how African writers incorporate digital technologies into their work, experiment with digital formats and use the internet to redefine their relationship to local and international audiences.
Scrutinize the complex economic, political, ideological, social and cultural contexts which caused and were remade by the emancipation of millions of African-descended people from slavery.
It’s a subculture often dismissed with a punch line: Nigerian youth who email unsuspecting victims and convince them to send money in return for nonexistent goods or deals. This semester, 25 Amherst students looked beyond the punch line to the young perpetrators of the infamous scam.
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