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Degrees Awarded: PhD (African Diaspora)
African American Studies has become an interdisciplinary field that focuses on race as a social construction. Our department has led the field with its emphasis on the African Diaspora and the cultures, patterns of social organization, political economies, life conditions, etc. of various African-based societies and communities in the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, Europe, and other areas of the world. In addition to the development of African American Studies as a coherent and innovative discipline, departmental efforts are focused on fundamental reformulations of the theories, frameworks and methods employed for understanding race and ethnicity.
The Ph.D. program is the culmination of the department’s renewed focus on the close to one billion people of African descent scattered across several regions of the world. Such a focus is reflected in changes we have made in our undergraduate curriculum. It emerges out of a conviction that a sound understanding of the realities of the life and culture of persons of African descent in the United States cannot but take into account the legacies of colonialism, enslavement, the plantation, and migration. Nor can such understandings ignore the development of ideologies of supremacy rooted in notions of race that emerged within the context of colonialism and slavery. The focus on Africa and the African Diaspora allows the use of comparative frameworks for the understanding of the specific realities of persons of African descent wherever they may find themselves.
African American Studies Faculty
BANKS, William M., III (Ed.D. Univ. of Kentucky) Counseling Psychology, Black Social Institutions
HENRY, Charles (Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago) Black Politics, Public Policy
HINTZEN, Percy (Ph.D. Yale Univ.) Political Sociology, Social Change
LAGUERRE, Michel S. (Ph.D. Univ. of Illinois) Caribbean Anthropology
Associate Professors
CLARK, Vè Vè (Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley) Francophone and Anglophone, Literature of Africa and the Caribbean
SMALL, Stephen (Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley) Sociology
TAYLOR, Ula Taylor (Ph.D. Univ. of California, Santa Barbara) American History
Adjunct Professor
ALLEN, Robert (Ph.D. University of California, San Francisco) Sociology
Affiliated Professors
GUILBAULT, Jocelyne (Ph.D. Univ. of Michigan) Musicology (Ethnomusicology)
MARTIN, Waldo E., Jr. (Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley) (History) Recent US, Black, Cultural, Intellectual
O’NEAL, Mary Lovelace (MFA Columbia University)
STOVALL, Tyler (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison) French History
TRINH, Minh-Ha (Ph.D. Univ. of Illinois) Women’s Studies and Rhetoric (Film Theory & Production; Third World Film; Feminist Theory) Film and Rhetoric
African American Studies Department
University of California, Berkeley
660 Barrows Hall #2572
Berkeley, CA 94720-2572
Phone: 510/642-7084
Fax: 510/642-0318
e-mail:
Web site: http://violet.berkeley.edu/~africam/
Chair: Stephen A. Small
University of California, Berkeley
Graduate Admissions Office
309 Sproul Hall
Berkeley, California 94720
Telephone: 510-642-7405
E-mail:
http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/prospective/
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