The African American Studies program at Northwestern University offers a vibrant and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the experiences of African Americans and people of African descent worldwide.
Founded in 1972, the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern is a vibrant place for intellectual exchange, pedagological innovation, and community engagement. The department considers different manifestations of blackness as well as other forms of racialized identity across the globe from historical, theoretical, and cultural perspectives.
Our mission is to advance critical understandings of the central role that race plays in structuring lives, spaces, relations of power, and subjectivities within modern social formations. We believe that this perspective provides a useful lens for understanding the destructive effects of racial subjugation and Eurocentrism the world over, effects that have always intersected with gender, class, sexuality, and geopolitics.
The members of the faculty, therefore, find it imperative to examine the black experience within complex global processes of racial ordering in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Pacific, and Asia.
Curriculum Overview
Black Studies by its very nature is an interdisciplinary field. It acquaints students with myriad ways of thinking, researching, and writing about the diverse experiences of African Americans in the United States and of African descended people throughout the African Diaspora (from dispersion, colonialism, the slave trade and slavery, through emancipation, decolonization, independence, and postcolonialism).
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The program offers a wide range of courses that explore various aspects of Black history, culture, and society. Here are some examples of the courses offered:
- Small, writing and discussion-oriented course exploring a specific topic or theme, and introducing skills necessary to thrive at Northwestern.
- Small, writing and discussion-oriented course exploring a specific topic or theme, and focused on the fundamentals of effective, college-level written communication.
- Literature of Black people in the United States from slavery to freedom.
- Introductory survey of fiction, poetry, drama, folktales, and other literary forms of Africa and the African diaspora.
- Introductory survey of the history of Africans and their descendants across the globe.
- Introductory survey of the history of Africans and their descendants across the globe.
- Survey of African American culture from slavery to the present.
- BLK_ST 247-0 Black Life. Trans Life. This course will introduce students to the parameters and textures of Black life, Trans life, and Black Trans life.
- Thematic and historical survey of African American drama.
- Exploration of Afro-Latin communities, cultures, and identities throughout Latin America and the Hispanic diaspora after 1800.
ENGLISH 266-0 and BLK_ST 210-0 are taught together; may receive credit for only 1 of these courses. Suitable for majors and non-majors.
Key Themes Explored
The curriculum delves into various critical themes, including:
- African origins, the slave trade, origins of slavery and racism in the United States, life under slavery in the North and the South.
- Emancipation to the civil rights era. Reconstruction, rise of legal segregation, strategies of resistance, migration, and urbanization.
- Problems and experiences of racialized minorities: Blacks, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latina/o peoples.
- Race, class, and gender in work, family and reproduction, education, poverty, sexuality, and consumer culture.
- Historical analysis of reparations, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and affirmative action.
- Examination of the evolution and persistence of the notion of "race" in 19th century America, with attention to the origins of the idea of race in the West.
- Impact of racism in the formation of Western modernity.
- Development of critical approaches to African American studies from the perspectives of postcolonial analysis.
Advanced Studies
The Department offers advanced graduate training through a PhD in Black Studies. Our undergraduate program is outstanding and draws students from across the university and across cultures.
- Introduction to central debates in Black Studies on a graduate level.
- Examines the multiple and changing meanings and political effects of gender and sexuality on Black identity in different socio-cultural contexts.
- Introduces students to cultural, social, historical, artistic, and theoretical approaches to developing a global analytics of Blackness.
- Surveys Blackness as a category of critical analysis for both historical and contemporary social formations in the African Diaspora.
- Interrogates the development of Black History and its writing.
- Examines the voices, struggles, theorizing, leadership, and writings of Black women, individually and collectively, locally and in Diaspora.
- Uses texts from sociology, anthropology, political science, and other social sciences to consider how the concepts of "race" and "Blackness" have functioned across time and space.
- Explores special topics pertinent to Black Studies.
Faculty and Research
The Department of Black Studies is comprised of renowned core faculty and faculty affiliates who are integrally involved in the teaching, service, and research interests of the department. Affiliated faculty members are invited, and in fact expected, to be key participants in Black Studies.
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Our core faculty and affiliates come from a range of disciplines and interdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences. By placing these scholars in conversation with one another, we aim to encourage an understanding of how, where, and when traditional disciplinary boundaries begin to blur.
Through the use of empirical evidence, diverse methodologies and intellectual approaches this field boasts a rigorous engagement with communities of African descent in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe, among others.
Research Areas
Each of these areas is populated by scholars within the department who focus their research within a domestic and/or international context. Students in this program are also encouraged to participate in TGS’s Interdisciplinary Cluster Initiative program.
Advanced work on social, cultural, or historical topics. Methods of researching the Black experience. Identification of research problems; location, selection, and critique of relevant literature; data gathering and analysis; report writing. Analysis of social and cultural institutions through field study and participant observation.
Events and News
The Program of African Studies, part of the Office for Research at Northwestern University, is one of its many centers dedicated to conducting research with a global impact.
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Founded in 2006, our program seeks to train the next generation of African Americanists in the areas of Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies; Politics, Society, and Culture; and Historical Studies.
Here are some examples of events:
- Feb122026SAVE THE DATE CAAH/Chabraja lecture4:00 PM - 7:00 PM, No LocationChabraja/Center for African American History Distinguished Lecture in African American History.
- Apr292026SAVE THE DATE Leon Forrest Lecture4:00 PM - 7:00 PM, No LocationLeon Forrest Lecture.
Here are some examples of news:
- Congratulations to Dr. Isaac Ginsberg Miller
- Congratulations to Jalin Jackson
- Black Studies PhD alum Claudia Garcia-Rojas wins ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship
- Congratulations to Dr. Christopher Montague
- Congratulations to Black Studies affiliate faculty member Akin Ogundiran
Additional Resources
- Parallel Perspectives is back with new episodes! Explore the PAS Youtube channel to watch video series on a variety of subjects, discussed by African Studies scholars from around the world.
- Africanist Press Podcast. Northwestern History Alum and Africanist Press editor-in-Chief Chernoh Bah has a new podcast series.
Tuition Fee
The tuition fee is 69375 USD per year.
This is an exciting time to be an African American Studies scholar!
Our scholarship and teaching build and explore analytic paradigms that tease out the commonalities and connections, as well as the differences and debates, with respect to how people organize communities, shape cultures, and navigate dominant racial power structures.
Black protest, Black radical politics and Black-led demonstrations are nothing new. How should we understand the motivations and ideas involved in Black radical politics?
Analysis of class, gender, sexuality, immigrant status, and ethnic origin in Black society and politics. Comparative historical analysis of relations of these groups in the United States, including racialized and sexualized discourses structuring interracial relations and social, political, and economic location. Slavery, immigration, model minority myth, cross-racial politics.
Exploration of demographic trends in interracial and interethnic marriages to highlight the complexity of the American experience. Special attention to mixed-race experiences portrayed in film and novels.
Introduces students to the variety of Black religions that developed during and after the Atlantic slave trade up to the present. Explores these traditions as continuities/changes of West African religious cosmologies. Examines the interplay between religion, politics, and the constructions of racial identities within various forms of Christianity, Islam, and other expressive cultures.
Students will explore how the afterlives of colonialism and slavery have shaped the contemporary relationships between Africans and African Americans. Divides between these groups, as well as areas of positive cross-cultural collaboration. Cross-racial exchange in youth expressions, popular culture, hip-hop.
Race as a social concept and recurrent cause of differentiation in multiracial societies. Impact of race on social, cultural, economic, and political institutions. public schools structured by anti-Blackness. Readings in classic Black American fiction. The author as creator and participant.
Making the historical, political, and cultural formation of whiteness in Western modernity visible and narratable for commentary and analysis.
Advanced introduction to critical theories of race and racialization. Investigation of Blackness as a category of critical analysis for analyzing Afro-diasporic formations.
In-depth examination of a selected author's body of work. Choice of author varies.
Individualized training and practice as a teaching assistant (TA). Independent research in first two years of PhD program, including summers.
