Africana Studies Minor

Co-Director: Dr. Emanuela Kucik, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies
Inteirm Co-Director: Dr. Margo Hobbs, Professor of Art
Assistant Professor:  Kucik
Lecturer: Meek

The Africana Studies minor is an interdisciplinary study of the history, culture, and socio-economic experience of people of African descent living on the African continent and in Black Atlantic societies, including the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Africana Studies is a scholarly field that interrogates the role of race – and, in particular, Blackness – in the structuring of society, identity, culture, power, and history. It chronicles the development and contributions of the peoples of the African Diaspora; the ongoing manifestations of racial subjugation; and the resistance against that subjugation. Africana Studies differs from many academic disciplines in that its practitioners consciously and unapologetically pursue racial justice and the undoing of systemic inequity. 

Africana Studies is comprised of scholarly and artistic responses created by African and African-descendant peoples in reaction to the devastating impact and ramifications of racism, from colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to state-sanctioned police brutality in the twenty-first century United States. The research methods of the field are necessarily interdisciplinary and intersectional (i.e., the simultaneity of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.), and the knowledge produced is often comparative and global in scope.