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.
Trace “the African Diaspora" from 15th-century European explorations of coastal West Africa to Brazil’s 1888 abolition of slavery. Examine large-scale historical processes as well as African and African-American lives, communities and cultures.
Explore the broadest themes of Black studies through careful reading of this influential novel, comparing it to other examples from world literature, American literature, and the black literary tradition.
Every year we award the Edward Jones Prize, named for the College’s first Black alumnus, and the Charles Hamilton Houston Prize, named for the civil rights lawyer and member of the Amherst Class of 1915 (pictured here).