Graduate Program
The African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) Ph.D. program provides students with the necessary skills and analytical framework to engage interdisciplinary approaches for examining the lives of people of African descent throughout Africa and the African Diaspora, including the United States. Students will develop the broad foundational knowledge necessary to pursue an academic career and to conduct scholarly research in African and African Diaspora Studies and related fields.
AADS faculty and students understand the urgent need to critically address all aspects of Black life. Therefore, the AADS graduate program requires students to grapple with questions central to the field such as:
- What is Blackness and how is it lived and expressed throughout the African Diaspora?
- What is race and how has it functioned in intersection with gender, sexuality, and class in the constitution of modernity, space, and selfhood?
- What is the relationship of slavery and anti-black racisms to capitalism, empire, and democracy, and what are the legacies?
- What are the cultural, imaginative, and institutional forms that have organized Black communal life?
Students pursue these and other questions by engaging key works within the subfields of Black feminism, Black history, Black queer theory, critical race theory, critical educational studies, performance studies, political economy, and political philosophy.
Apply for the AADS Ph.D. program in an upcoming term. What starts here changes the world.
