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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

2025
  
2023
  
2022
  
2021
  
View Full Archive


2023 Past Events

  • Friday, December 22, 2023 
    Join Professors John Ryle (Bard Africana Studies Director) and Lloyd Hazvineyi (OSUN Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard)
    Kline College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    You are invited to the Africa Table on Friday, November 10 and subsequent Fridays in the College Room in Kline. 

    The Africa Table is an informal lunchtime gathering for students, staff, and faculty—those from African countries and those with an interest in the continent. All are welcome. No agenda; many languages. Bring your lunch and join us—every Friday til the end of term—between noon and 2 pm. 

    Looking forward to seeing you.

  • Friday, December 15, 2023 
    Join Professors John Ryle (Bard Africana Studies Director) and Lloyd Hazvineyi (OSUN Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard)
    Kline College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    You are invited to the Africa Table on Friday, November 10 and subsequent Fridays in the College Room in Kline. 

    The Africa Table is an informal lunchtime gathering for students, staff, and faculty—those from African countries and those with an interest in the continent. All are welcome. No agenda; many languages. Bring your lunch and join us—every Friday til the end of term—between noon and 2 pm. 

    Looking forward to seeing you.

  • Friday, December 8, 2023 
    Join Professors John Ryle (Bard Africana Studies Director) and Lloyd Hazvineyi (OSUN Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard)
    Kline College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    You are invited to the Africa Table on Friday, November 10 and subsequent Fridays in the College Room in Kline. 

    The Africa Table is an informal lunchtime gathering for students, staff, and faculty—those from African countries and those with an interest in the continent. All are welcome. No agenda; many languages. Bring your lunch and join us—every Friday til the end of term—between noon and 2 pm. 

    Looking forward to seeing you.

  • Friday, December 1, 2023 
    Join Professors John Ryle (Bard Africana Studies Director) and Lloyd Hazvineyi (OSUN Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard)
    Kline College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    You are invited to the Africa Table on Friday, November 10 and subsequent Fridays in the College Room in Kline. 

    The Africa Table is an informal lunchtime gathering for students, staff, and faculty—those from African countries and those with an interest in the continent. All are welcome. No agenda; many languages. Bring your lunch and join us—every Friday til the end of term—between noon and 2 pm. 

    Looking forward to seeing you.

  • Friday, November 24, 2023 
    Join Professors John Ryle (Bard Africana Studies Director) and Lloyd Hazvineyi (OSUN Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard)
    Kline College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    You are invited to the Africa Table on Friday, November 10 and subsequent Fridays in the College Room in Kline. 

    The Africa Table is an informal lunchtime gathering for students, staff, and faculty—those from African countries and those with an interest in the continent. All are welcome. No agenda; many languages. Bring your lunch and join us—every Friday til the end of term—between noon and 2 pm. 

    Looking forward to seeing you.

  • Friday, November 17, 2023 
    Join Professors John Ryle (Bard Africana Studies Director) and Lloyd Hazvineyi (OSUN Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard)
    Kline College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    You are invited to the Africa Table on Friday, November 10 and subsequent Fridays in the College Room in Kline. 

    The Africa Table is an informal lunchtime gathering for students, staff, and faculty—those from African countries and those with an interest in the continent. All are welcome. No agenda; many languages. Bring your lunch and join us—every Friday til the end of term—between noon and 2 pm. 

    Looking forward to seeing you.

  • Friday, November 10, 2023 
    Join Professors John Ryle (Bard Africana Studies Director) and Lloyd Hazvineyi (OSUN Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard)
    Kline College Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    You are invited to the Africa Table on Friday, November 10 and subsequent Fridays in the College Room in Kline. 

    The Africa Table is an informal lunchtime gathering for students, staff, and faculty—those from African countries and those with an interest in the continent. All are welcome. No agenda; many languages. Bring your lunch and join us—every Friday til the end of term—between noon and 2 pm. 

    Looking forward to seeing you.

  • Wednesday, November 8, 2023 
      Naiima Khahaifa, Guarini Fellow
    Departments of Geography and 
    African and African-American Studies
    Dartmouth College 

    Olin 102  5:15 pm EST/GMT-5
    Mass incarceration, characterized by unprecedented prison population growth in the US and a disproportionately large representation of Black men, has garnered much scholarly attention; however, a parallel increase in the proportion of Black correctional officers (COs) has not yet received the same consideration. During the early 1970s, demands made by the Prisoners’ Rights Movement led to the recruitment of thousands of Black men and women into the US correctional workforce over the following decades. Thus, focusing on New York State, I argue that as correctional workforce integration redefined the state’s prison system and broader carceral geography, the racialized process of mass incarceration came to depend on the labor of Black COs. Based on a qualitative analysis of life/occupational history interviews with Black COs in Buffalo, NY, recruited between the late 1970s and early 1990s, I find that dynamics of race, class, and gender shape relationships between Black COs and incarcerated individuals as their day-to-day encounters cultivated cooperation and consent in an otherwise volatile prison environment. Deriving from notions of community policing and fictive kinship, I developed the concept of carceral kinship, which refers to the formation of familial-like bonds that appeared the strongest between Black women COs and Black incarcerated men. This concept matters because it reveals the intricate dynamics and micro-politics of prison spaces and how carceral geographies rely on intimate, empathetic, and emotional care work that is profoundly raced and gendered.  

  • Wednesday, May 17, 2023 
    Olin LC 208; Olin Language Center  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
    The students of AS 315 and Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck present a two-part letter writing night in solidarity with Indigenous political prisoners Maddesyn George and Leonard Peltier:

    5/15 - Community letter writing night at Blackbird Infoshop, 587 Abeel Street, Kingston, NY.

    5/17 - Olin Languages Center 208; Information and letter writing night with virtual talk by Hupa abolitionist scholar Stephanie Lumsden, Gender Studies, UCLA; Maddesyn George Defense Committee.

    Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa) is a scholar and teacher. She received her B.A. in Women's Studies from Portland State University in 2011 and her M.A. in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis in 2014. She earned her second M.A. in Gender Studies from UCLA in 2018. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA . Stephanie is a 2021-2022 Ford Fellow and a recipient of the University of California President's Postdoctoral fellowship

    Maddesyn George (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a survivor of domestic and sexual violence who has been incarcerated since July 2020 for defending herself against a white man who raped and threatened her. Facing a murder charge and decades in prison, Maddesyn accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors after being incarcerated and separated from her infant daughter for more than a year. She was sentenced in the Eastern District of Washington Federal Court on November 17, 2021 to serve 6.5 years in prison.


    This website is organized by Maddesyn George’s defense committee, a grassroots coalition of members of Maddesyn’s family; members of the Colville Confederated Tribes and Spokane nation; survivors of gender violence; and advocates, organizers, and scholars who work on issues of colonial, sexual, and domestic violence; policing and incarceration; and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples. Read the defense committee’s statement on Maddesyn’s sentencing

    Leonard Peltier is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota nations who has been  imprisoned for 48 years. . Leonard Peltier was wrongly convicted in the 1970s for his organizing with the American Indian Movement in defense of Pine Ridge traditionalists, and is now the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States. “The United States of America has kept me locked up because I am American Indian,” said the ailing Indigenous rights activist who Biden could free, but hasn’t. For more info, see the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.

  • Wednesday, May 3, 2023 
    Ketaki Pant '06, Assistant Professor of History, University of Southern California
    Hegeman 106  3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Despite their centrality to Mauritius’s plantation economy, merchants from Gujarat (western India) remain in the shadows of histories of slavery and indentured labor migration on the island. This talk takes stock of these erased histories by retelling the story of one plantation, Bel Ombre, which was variously owned by French planters and Gujarati merchants in the nineteenth century. Moving between the space of Bel Ombre today, records in the Mauritius National Archives, and old ports in Gujarat, I analyze the archival processes through which Gujarati mercantile intimacies were recorded and obscured. I argue that the archival segregation of records about plantation property ownership and indentured labor was central to the erasure of Gujarati merchants from histories of racial capitalism on the island. I show that the colonial state enacted gendered violence on indentured women whose sexuality was policed and pathologized while Gujarati merchants were able to marry across racial lines through sanctioned property and marriage arrangements. These silences were amplified by Indian anticolonial nationalists who arrived on Mauritius in the twentieth century to take up the cause of Indian indentured workers but who, ironically, papered over racial capitalism in favor of a pan-Indian identity. In old ports in Gujarat, merchant families built and maintained houses (havelis) which were scrubbed clean of these messy intimacies across the ocean. Reaching across the ocean from Gujarat to Mauritius and back, this talk suggests that these are haunted houses and histories.

    Ketaki Pant is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on South Asia and the Indian Ocean arena from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Her current projects examine interlinked histories of racial capitalism, gendered belonging, minoritization, and displacement centered on Gujarat. Recent publications include an article in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Transnationalism.

  • Friday, February 10, 2023 
      Webinar talk by Danielle Purifoy
    Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    This talk examines how the contemporary timber industry reproduces plantation power. It explores the “remote control” of land — such as absentee land ownership, Black family land grabs, new markets for energy, and legal regimes designed to “devalue” common property in favor of individual ownership and profit. Multi-generation Black homeplaces and communities, rooted in alternative modes of land relations, sustain themselves despite the friction between the economic interests of racial capitalism and the ecological interests of long-standing forest interdependence. With the further concentration of forestland ownership and local divestment throughout the Alabama Black Belt and the US South, the reciprocal traditions of Black forest ecologies represent modes of land relation and intervention that are necessary for livable futures.

    The CHRA Talk & Book Series celebrates critical voices working at the intersection of Human Rights and the Arts. Each year, we invite inspiring artists and activists from around the globe to share their practice or discuss their research. Each public talk is followed by a moderated discussion, and both are subsequently edited and published in a collected volume. 

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