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Main Image for Africana Studies

Africana Studies

Donna Ford Grover,  visiting associate professor of literature and American studies. Photo by Chris Kayden
Africana Studies Menu
Apply Now!
The Africana Studies Concentration
is an interdisciplinary concentration that examines the cultures, histories, and politics of African peoples on the African continent and throughout the African diaspora. The Africana Studies concentration teaches students to use diverse historical, political, ethnographic, artistic, and literary forms of analysis. Through these interdisciplinary studies, students trace the historical and cultural connections between Africa and the rest of the world, and explore their importance for African peoples and the nature of modern global society.

About the Program

  • Requirements
    Concentration in Africana Studies must be combined with a major in a traditional disciplinary program. Ideally, a student moderates simultaneously in Africana Studies and the disciplinary program. Before Moderation, a student is expected to take at least three Africana Studies courses or Africana Studies cross-listed courses, including the core course, Africana Studies 101, Introduction to Africana Studies, or the equivalent. To graduate, the student must take two additional Africana Studies or cross-listed courses, including one 300-level seminar. The Moderation and Senior Project boards should each include one Africana Studies core faculty member.

Faculty Members and Associates

Director:
Helen Epstein

Daniel Williams
Yuka Suzuki
Wendy Urban-Mead
Tabetha Ewing
Sayeeda Moreno
Susan Aberth
Souleymane Badolo
Peter Rosenblum
Peter L'Official
Nuruddin Farah
Lloyd Hazvineyi
Kwame Holmes
Jomaira Salas Pujols
John Ryle
Helen Epstein
Donna Grover
Dinaw Mengestu
Dina Ramadan
Christian Crouch

Ziad Dallal
Youssef Ait Benasser
Yarran Hominh
Victor Apryshchenko
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Sarah Dunphy-Lelii
Sanjay De Silva
Robert Tynes
Robert Cioffi
Kobena Mercer
John Esposito
Jennifer Phillips
Luis Chavez
Ibrahim Elhoudaiby
Felicia Keesing
Erin Atwell
Ephraim Asili
Drew Thompson
Dawn Lundy Martin

Courses

Each semester Bard offers a selection of Africana Studies courses and a series of courses cross-listed from related programs. Follow the link below to view the courses being offered this semester.

View the Current Courses

Senior Projects

Complete versions of Africana Studies Senior Projects available at the library’s Digital Commons linked below.

Go to Digital Commons

Reflecting on the Moment

Conversations on Racial Equity and Justice

Drew Thompson, Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies and Director of Africana Studies, and Dariel Vasquez ’17, cofounder and codirector of Brothers@Bard and Brothers@, speak about the role of mentorship and the university in the wake of the global pandemic and police brutality.

Events Archive

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View Full Archive


2025 Past Events

  • Tuesday, April 15, 2025 
      Jazz at Bard and the László Z. Bitó Conservatory of Music Present
    Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space  4:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Free and open to the public.
    Artist Talk with Eri Yamamoto: 4:00–5:00 PM, Blum N211
    Concert: 7:30 PM, László Z. Bitó Conservatory Performance Space
    Featuring: Eri Yamamoto, piano; William Parker, bass; Ikuo Takeuchi, drums.

    Eri Yamamoto has firmly established herself as one of Jazz’s most original and compelling pianists and composers. Her artistry has been lauded by Jazz legends and critics alike. This special concert is dedicated to the memory of Richard Gordon, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Bard College and a consummate Jazz pianist. His enduring contributions to both academia and the arts will be honored through this musical tribute. The series is generously supported by Bard Jazz Studies, the Bitó Conservatory of Music, and private donations in his memory.

    Download: Eri-Yamamoto-Poster-1.pdf
  • Wednesday, February 12, 2025 
    A Talk by Peter Vale, Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
    Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    In mid-May each year, following the annual sorghum harvest, the heads of the Bayeke and Basanga of the southern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), known as Katanga, declare: tuye tukadie mukuba, “let’s go eat the copper.” But what does it mean to “eat” copper? This talk traces the evolution of this unique idea during the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. In drawing together copper artifacts, oral accounts, colonial ethnographies, historical images, and postcolonial propaganda, this talk suggests that the “eating” of copper represents the deep material and conceptual tie between agriculture and mining in Central African environmental systems.

    Indigenous miners consistently re-imagined modes of human engagement with the earth and its resources to foster new economic and ecological potentials. The historical persistence of this notion of “eating copper” underscores the profound cultural and economic attachments that have shaped Congolese communities’ relationships to extraction in a locale that has become the epicenter for global decarbonization and inequality initiatives.

    Peter Vale is a historian of Africa, specializing in environmental systems, political economy, and empire to decolonization. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. His present book project, The Copper Eaters: Inventing Capitalism in Central Africa, asks why, despite persistent economic decline and devastating ecological consequences, Congolese (DRC) workers, residents, and officials have maintained such a deep attachment to a copper mining industry dominated by extractive, foreign capital. Drawing on community bulletins in Kiswahili, Kisanga, and French; interviews with miners and executives; and archives across seven countries, he traces the layering of social institutions, environmental knowledge, and political interests that have shaped Congolese expectations towards mineral extraction. He is also working on developing a second research project, tentatively titled Pan-African Skies, which will offer the first transnational history of African airlines.
  • Monday, February 10, 2025 
    A Talk by Folarin Ajibade, Assistant Professor of History, Florida State University
    Hegeman 204  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    This talk traces the sociocultural and political significance of urban gambling in Nigeria from the colonial to the contemporary period, exploring a critical moment of transition in Nigeria's history between the 1960s and the 1980s. Ajibade argues that during the first two decades of Nigeria's independence, popular gambling came to embody contentions in Nigerian civil society over the nature of the relationship between the Nigerian state and its urban masses. 

    Folarin Ajibade is a historian of everyday life, with a regional focus on West Africa. He is broadly interested in the mundane and daily activities that urban Africans partake in, and engages with these activities as consequential and revelatory rather than as trivial pursuits. He received his PhD in African and African Diaspora History from New York University (NYU) in 2024, where he began working on his current manuscript, which is a history of the politics and profits of commercial gambling in urban Nigeria from the 1880s onward. Part of this work has been published in the Journal of African History.
  • Friday, February 7, 2025 
    A Talk By Elizabeth Ann Fretwell, Assistant Professor of African History, Old Dominion University
    Olin Humanities, Room 102  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    This talk traces the development of artisanal tailoring in mid-twentieth century Bénin, West Africa to show how everyday tailors served as important cultural and technological innovators. Drawing on evidence from apprenticeship, oral history, and archives, it explores the entanglement of materials, craft knowledge, and sartorial meaning in the creation of popular and enduring Béninois men’s styles. In doing so, it demonstrates how tailors helped fashion identities through clothes-making, giving form and expression to the political and social challenges of modernity, urbanization, and decolonization.

    Elizabeth Ann Fretwell is Assistant Professor of African History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She has also taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and at the University of Chicago where she received her PhD. Her research on material culture, technology, gender, and labor in French-speaking western Africa has appeared in Radical Historical Review, History and Technology, and Journal of Urban History. Her first book, Tailoring Identities: Craft, Technology, and Style in Bénin, is forthcoming with Indiana University Press.

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