Which department in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences boasts top faculty who came to Northwestern from highly regarded institutions, such as Harvard and Columbia? Which department deftly blends scholarship and current events in ways that levarage a better understanding of minority cultures? Which department attracts world-renowned lecturers and thinkers, like author Toni Morrison? If you answered the Department of African American Studies, you're right. With a new PhD program, students, faculty, alumni, and donors are all interested in being a part of this exciting discipline.

The study of the African American experience has a long and distinguished history in the United States. The field has developed exciting insights as well as firm intellectual and empirical foundations for the systematic study of the African American experience and, through such study, for a greater understanding of the larger American experience. From its beginnings, the field has been strongly interdisciplinary, bringing the perspectives of different disciplines to bear on understanding African American life and culture. The Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University exemplifies these traditions and strengths and, through its courses, provides opportunities to explore the richness and diversity of the African American experience in a meaningful and coherent way. Now, for the first time, a PhD is available to graduate students who desire to dig deeply into this richness and diversity.

"The program will start in Fall 2006, so the group of students that is applying right now is the first group to apply for this opportunity," says associate professor of African American Studies and History Dr. Martha Biondi. "We're really excited about that."

Dr. Mary Patillo Professor of African American Studies & Sociology

The department is renowned for offering courses that focus on people of African descent in the United States and other regions of the Americas and the African Diaspora - the communities created by the dispersion of peoples from the African continent. By comparing the black experience in various parts of the world, students learn to analyze identity, race, and racism as formations that change over time and space. This broad study of the African American experience is one of the key features of the department, distinguishing it from similar departments at other institutions. Major themes in the curriculum include the nature of colonization and its impact on the colonizer and the colonized; racism and its effects on society as well as on scholarship; the importance of oral language, history, and tradition in the African American experience; the roots and development of African American music, literature, and religion; analysis of key institutions such as the family; and the traffic of people, ideas, and artifacts throughout the African diaspora.

The undergraduate major in African American studies provides good preparation for graduate work in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as for jobs and careers in a variety of fields. Education, law, journalism, urban planning, health-care delivery and administration, business, social work, and politics are only a few of the fields for which African American Studies provides an excellent background. In addition, since scholars and political leaders are paying increased attention to the Caribbean and Latin America as well as to blacks and other minorities in the United States, students of African American Studies will enter a field that touches on issues of far-reaching national and international significance.

Give online or contact Kristen Williams, Director of Development for WCAS, at k-williams3@northwestern.edu or (847) 491-4585 to find out more about how you can support the Department of African Studies.