B.A. in Africana Studies

The Center for Africana Studies (CAS) offers a rigorous focus on African-descended peoples and their cultures across the globe. Over the past millennium, the contribution, traditions, and values of African, African-American, and African Diaspora cultures helped create the modern and pre-modern world. Africana studies, as a field of study, grew from the activist and scholarly traditions of black studies and the blending of peoples and ideas between Europe, Africa, and the America. It therefore offers a broad, multidisciplinary approach to history and culture centered on the interests, conditions, philosophies, conceptual schemes, and value systems of African-descended people everywhere. Our courses focus on the human experience in the context of social, political, demographic, cultural, religious, and economic systems. They also offer a unique perspective on racism, colonialism, capitalism, and geography that properly situates the importance of people of color to the making of the modern world. The Center for Africana Studies offers a multidisciplinary curriculum that expands the scope and range of traditional academic disciplines to the presence, roles, cultural contributions, experiences, and particular interests of African peoples and their descendants.