African American and African Studies Courses
1000 Level
AFAMAST 1101 - Introduction to African American and African Studies
Introduction to the scholarly study of the Africana experience, focusing on patterns of resistance, adaptation, diversity, and transnational connections.
GEN Foundation: Social and Behavioral Sciences, GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity & Gender Diversity
AFAMAST 1111 - Introduction to Africa
This course is a multidisciplinary introduction to the history, peoples, and cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa. Via a diverse set of sources and mediums, including films, literature, visual art, human rights reports, etc., students will be introduced to a number of important expressions, ideas, episodes, events, and trends in Africa, past and present.
GEN Foundation: Historical & Cultural Studies
AFAMAST 1112 - Introduction to the Black World
This course introduces students to the history and present of the Black World, encompassing both the African continent and its diasporas. Students will explore the historical events and the racial ideologies that shaped global Blackness and examine political, cultural, social, and religious expressions among a variety of communities within the global African diaspora.
GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity & Gender Diversity
AFAMAST 1121 - African Civilizations to 1870
Exploration of the political, social, and economic history of precolonial African civilizations, using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and materials.
GEN Foundation: Historical & Cultural Studies
AFAMAST 1122 - African Civilizations, 1870 to the Present
Exploration of the political, social, and economic history of colonial and independent African countries, using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and material.
GEN Foundation: Historical & Cultural Studies
2000 Level
AFAMAST 2080 - African American History to 1877
The study of African American experience in America from arrival through the era of Reconstruction, focusing on slavery, resistance movements, and African American culture.
GEN Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies; GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 2081 - African American History from 1877
The study of the African American experience in the United States from the era of Reconstruction through the present.
GEN Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies; GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 2101 - Introduction to African Art and Archaeology
The Art and Archaeology of Africa with emphasis on the historic cultures of Rock Art (8,000 B.C.), Egypt (3,000 B.C.), Nok (900 B.C.), Igbo-Ukwu (695 A.D.), Ife (1200 A.D.), and Benin (1400-1900 A.D.).
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts
Cross Listed: History of Art
AFAMAST 2201 - Major Readings in African American and African Studies
An introduction to major authors and texts contributing to the discourses that have shaped and defined African American and African Studies from its inception to the present.
GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity & Gender Diversity
Major or Minor Requirement
AFAMAST 2218 - Black Urban Experience
Examination of contemporary black urban experience focused on the impact of persistent residential segregation, increasing class polarization, and the global force of hip hop culture.
GEN Foundation: Social and Behavioral Sciences, GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity & Gender Diversity
AFAMAST 2251- Introduction to African Literature
An assessment of the oral prose traditions and written prose of African Literature; specific emphasis placed on student readings from primary sources.
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts
AFAMAST 2253 - Introduction to Caribbean Literature
An introduction to Caribbean literature with a focus on prose, poetry, and drama.
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts
AFAMAST 2270 - Introduction to Black Popular Culture
A critical analysis of the commodity production and consumption of black popular culture products, such as fashion, film, urban fiction, music, vernacular expression, television and advertising.
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts, GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity & Gender Diversity
2275 - Blackness and the Politics of Sports
This interdisciplinary course considers the role of Black athletes in society and culture, the racial politics involved, and the global implications of race on courts, playing fields, tracks, and other athletic arenas.
GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity, & Gender Diversity
AFAMAST 2281 - Introduction to African-American Literature
A study of representative literary works by African-American writers from 1760 to the present.
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts, GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity, & Gender Diversity
Cross Listed: English
AFAMAST 2285 - Afropop: Popular Music and Culture in Contemporary Africa
This course focuses on the rich variety, aesthetic beauty, and political significance of popular music in modern African cities. By closely attending to the genres, forms, styles, and social life of African popular music, students will encounter the dynamic soundscape of popular culture in Africa today.
GEN Foundation: Historical and Cultural Studies; GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity, & Gender Diversity
AFAMAST 2288 - Bebop to Doowop to Hiphop: The Rhythm and Blues Tradition
Examines the aesthetic and historical evolution of rhythm and blues: black music tradition including bebop, rock and roll, and hip hop, redefining American popular culture post-WWII.
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts
Cross Listed: Music
AFAMAST 2301 - African Peoples and Empires in World History
A thematic course focusing on African world history, empire building, and commercial and cultural links across the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean worlds before and during the Atlantic slave trade.
GEN Foundation: Historical & Cultural Studies
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 2302 - History of Modern African, 1800-1960s
Thematic survey of African history from 1800 to the 1960s.
GEN Foundation: Historical & Cultural Studies
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 2303 - History of Contemporary Africa, 1960 – present
Africa from independence to the present. Contemporary African societies, cultures, economics, and politics from independence to the present.
GEN Foundation: Historical & Cultural Studies
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 2367.01 - African-American Voices in U.S. Literature
Discussion, analysis, and writing about issues presented through the diverse voices of African American literature.
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts
AFAMAST 2367.04 - Black Women Writers: Text and Context
Writing and analysis of black women's literary representations of issues in United States social history.
GEN Foundation: Literary, Visual & Performing Arts, GEN Foundation: Race, Ethnicity & Gender Diversity
Cross Listed: Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies
AFAMAST 2367.07S - Literacy Narratives of Black Columbus
This service-learning course focuses on collecting and preserving literacy narratives of Columbus-area Black communities. Through engagement with community partners, students refine skills in research, analysis, and composition; students synthesize information, create arguments about discursive/visual/cultural artifacts, and reflect on the literacy and life-history narratives of Black Columbus.
GEN Theme: Lived Environments
Cross Listed: English
3000 Level
3080 Slavery in the United States
The African American experience in slavery, focusing on the rise of the slave trade, slavery in the colonial and antebellum eras, the Civil War, and abolition.
Cross Listed: History
3082 Black Americans During the Progressive Era
History and experiences of black Americans during the period best known in American History as the Progressive Era. Sometimes this course is offered in a distance-only format.
Cross Listed: History
3083 Civil Rights and Black Power Movements
Examines the origins, evolution, and outcomes of the African American freedom struggle, focusing on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
Cross Listed: History
3084 Citizens Behind Bars Black Leadership and the Politics of Liberation in African American History
Every day more human beings are locked inside of jails, prison, or secured facilities across the United States more than in any other country on the planet. This course explores the history of citizenship and captivity and the legacy of liberatory movements lead by incarcerated citizens in the US from the era of settler colonization and slavery to the present age of mass incarceration.
Under review GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
Cross Listed: History and Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies
AFAMAST 3086 - Black Women in Slavery and Freedom
Traces the experiences and struggles of African American women from slavery through the Civil Rights/Black Power era.
GEN Theme: Migration, Mobility, and Immobility
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 3089 – Studies in African American History
Selected topics in African American history from the origins of slavery to the presentS.
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 3110 – Social (In)Justice and the Black Experience
This course will provide an historical grounding/foundation of Black social justice movements in America to help students understand some of the most pressing issues facing African Americans today. In so doing, this course will focus on key events, movements, and ideas that have shaped and informed Black peoples’ social justice efforts in the 20th and 21st centuries.
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
AFAMAST 3230 - Black Women: Culture and Politics
Examination of the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical forces, dynamics, and processes affecting women throughout the Africana world.
GEN Theme: Traditions, Cultures, & Transformations
AFAMAST 3260 - Global Black Cultural Movements
This course focuses on hemispheric studies in the Americas, examining black cultural movements emerging after emancipation through the present. It considers the ways people of African descent in the Americas have used cultural productions--literature, poetry, film, music, visual art, and performance--to construct identities; agitate for equality; and understand aesthetics as political and beautiful.
GEN Theme: Lived Environments
3304 History of Islam in Africa
Africa from the emergence of Islam in the 600s to the Present. African contributions to Islam and the impact of Islam on African societies.
Cross Listed: History
AFAMAST 3310 - Global Perspectives on the African Diaspora
Study of historical processes, key figures and ideas, and cultural expressions of the worldwide dispersion of people of African descent from different times and places.
GEN Theme: Lived Environments
Major or Minor Requirement
AFAMAST 3320 – History of African Cinema
Emergence and development of African cinema as a film genre and part of material culture. European colonial and ethnographic to modern African cinema.
Cross Listed: History (3310)
AFAMAST 3370 - Being African in America
We examine the particular experiences of first- and second-generation Africans in America, for whom today's amplified "us vs. them" rhetoric threatens to fracture what W.E.B. Du Bois called an African American sense of "two-ness." What are the constraints on a doubly conscious "African" and "American" identity in the United States? What are the challenges of sustaining a fragile social pluralism?
GEN Theme: Migration, Mobility, & Immobility
AFAMAST 3376 - Arts and Cultures of Africa and the Diaspora
An overview of African and African diaspora cultures from a historical perspective. Cultural media will include art, literature, film, dance, and photography.
GEN Theme: Migration, Mobility, & Immobility
Cross Listed: History of Art
AFAMAST 3440 - Theorizing Race
Introduction to issues of "race," consideration of the historical emergence and development of ideas of "race" and of racist practices, along with their contemporary formations.
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
Major Requirement
Cross Listed: Philosophy
AFAMAST 3450 - The Art and Politics of Hip-Hop
Explores the world of Hip-Hop, from its birth in the Bronx to its infiltration of music, fashion, television, film, dance, print culture, and politics. It considers critically the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, and geography as well as the ways in which Hip-Hop functions simultaneously as aesthetic, analytic, and politic.
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
3956 Black Cultures and Classical Education
Study the role of classics in African and the African Diaspora (US, Caribbean, Brazil). Major themes include: adaptations of classical literature, impact of classical education, classics as a tool of colonial oppression, classics as a tool of anti-colonial resistance, theories of race, classical and classicizing depictions of black bodies.
Cross Listed: Classics
4000 Level & above
4250 African Politics
An introductory survey of Sub-Saharan African politics from the pre-colonial period to the contemporary era. It will examine the common themes, issues, and trends that shape politics and development across forty-nine countries. Students will gain an understanding of how context shapes political behavior and how historical and political forces have influenced African politics.
Cross Listed: Political Science
4326 Topics in African American and Public Policy
Examination of the impact of public policies on African American communities in the U.S. from the New Deal's Welfare State policies and programs of the 1930's to the present.
AFAMAST 4342 - Religion, Meaning, and Knowledge in Africa and its Diaspora
While the practice of religion in Africa is as diverse as its people, three major belief systems define the practice: African Traditional Religion, Islam, and Christianity. This course will examine classical and contemporary definitions of African Traditional Religion/s and the introduction and adaptations of Islam and Christianity in Africa.
GEN Theme: Traditions, Cultures, & Transformations
Cross Listed: Religious Studies
4504 Black Politics
Economic, political, and social constraints on the development of black political power, the efforts made by black people in recent times to organize for effective political action.
Cross Listed: Political Science (4140)
4535 Topics in Black Masculinity
A theoretical analysis of constructions, perceptions, and performances of black masculinity locally and globally.
4551 Topics in Africana Literature
Topics selected will relate to varying issues in the literatures of the Africa and the African Diaspora.
4565 Topics in African Diaspora Studies
Selected topics which examine the origins, dimensions, and dynamics of the African Diaspora; topics vary each term.
AFAMAST 4571 - Black Visual Culture and Popular Media
An examination of African Americans in visual culture and the theories of representation in popular media.
GEN Theme: Traditions, Cultures, & Transformations
4582 Special Topics in African-American Literature
Focuses on themes in African-American Literature.
Cross Listed: English
4610 - African Americans and the Law
This is an interdisciplinary course that puts major legal cases affecting African Americans into conversation with their historical underpinnings, as well as the social contexts and how those contexts manifest in African American cultural productions. A central goal of the course is to interrogate the idea of a "colorblind" justice system.
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
AFAMAST 4921 - Intersections: Approaches to Theorizing Difference
Examines intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in various sites within American culture (e.g., legal system, civil rights discourse, social justice movements).
GEN Theme: Citizenship for a Diverse & Just World
Major Requirement
Cross Listed: Comparative Studies and Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies
5240 Race and Public Policy in the United States
This course explores Race and Public Policy in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. In particular, the class is designed to look at the long list of "hot topics" in the current policy landscape, including policing, housing, wealth gap, immigration, voting, political representation, and others.
Cross Listed: Comparative Studies and Public Affairs
AFAMAST 5650 - Blackness and the Body in Science and Medicine
This course considers the need for and pursuit of social justice when black bodies are subjected to commodification and systemic subordination. The course focuses on what Frantz Fanon called the "corporeal schema" of blackness as well as the social construction of blackness to think about the relationship between black bodies and social justice pursuits in medicine and science.
GEN Theme: Health & Well-being
Study Abroad
5798.03 Study Tour: Brazil
Consists of a two-week educational Study Trip that combines formal lectures by local scholars with visits to local cultural and historical institutions as well as travel within Brazil, the host Latin American country.
5798.04 Study Abroad in Africa and the Diaspora
A study tour of Africa and the Diaspora to accompany the 5485 pre-requisite courses. Students will pay all travel and subsistence costs. Successful application to eligible study abroad program required.