Seminars, Honors & Original Projects

Twelve-credit departmental honors program in which student develop original interdisciplinary scholarship in Africana Studies. See department website for requirements

This seminar is designed for advanced students of Africana Studies, and is a required course for majors and minors. After having completed most of your coursework in the discipline, the Seminar is your opportunity to explore some of the history and issues you have studied in greater depth, and to develop a research project using the conceptual and methodological tools of the discipline. The semester begins with a review of the core issues of the discipline of Africana Studies.

Seminars are a special kind of course, organized around a theme. The entire class reads about and discusses the theme, and each student will select a topic to write a 20-page research paper that allows you to explore that theme in a specific context. For the Fall 2020 semester students will conduct original research in the field of Africana Studies, exploring the theme of “Black Liberation in a Black Feminist Context” which will explore scholarship by Black women on Black liberation and freedom movements. We will briefly examine the history of resistance movements as well as the contributions of Black women writers, activists and scholars on what resistance and liberation look like. We will be examining the works of scholars such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Brittney Cooper, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, among others.

Since this is a certified core course covering the cognitive skills Writing and Communication, in which the culminating assignment in this course is a 20-page research paper, we will also spend time working through the multi-step process of writing a well-researched and well-written paper through assignments and in-class (online) workshops/exercises.