Our courses draw on literature, philosophy, history, and many other disciplines to examine African, African-American, and Caribbean/Latin American themes. We also study the social construction of racial differences and its relation to the perpetuation of racism and racial domination.
Our majors begin by studying the central debates and problems within our field. They go on to take courses on various Black cultures and to examine the links among them.
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Students explore topics such as gender and class issues in diasporic literature; international hip hop dance culture; the use of statistical models in predicting the spread of AIDS in Africa; and representations of Black children in picture books.
From our College Archives
Founded in the early 1970s in response to student protests and demands, we explore issues of race and the cultural connections between Africa and the Black diaspora. (Pictured: Amherst's first black faculty member, Professor James Q. Denton.)
From our College Archives
Our majors go on to careers in education, business, medicine, law and other fields in which an understanding of racial and cultural differences is important. Many complete graduate programs at top national research institutions.
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Each year, through the Charles Hamilton Houston Scholar-in-Residence program, we invite an important intellectual in the field to campus for a week to deliver a lecture, direct a faculty seminar and participate in the intellectual life on campus.
Carol Bailey, visiting professor of Black Studies, has a new book out. Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization was published by Rutgers University Press. In this work, Carol theorizes the city as a generative, “semicircular” social space in which the changes of globalization are most profoundly experienced. The fictive accounts she analyzes configure cities as spaces in which movement is simultaneously restrictive and liberating, and where life prospects are at once promising and daunting.
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John Bracey Jr., founder of the W.E.B. Du Bois Afro-American Studies Department at UMass Amherst, has passed away at the age of 81. Professor Bracey played a key role in helping establish Amherst College’s Black Studies Department in 1971. Through his prolific and wide-ranging writing and research, he made significant contributions to Black studies, civil rights and activism during his five decades at UMass.
Born in Chicago, Professor Bracey obtained his BA from Roosevelt University before performing graduate work at Roosevelt and at Northwestern University. At UMass, Professor Bracey also chaired the Afro-American Studies Department, and served as co-director of the department’s graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies.
In March of 2021, UMAss announced the John H. Bracey, Jr. Fellowship Fund, which “provides summer fellowship support for doctoral students in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies.”
John Bracey photo: University of Massachusetts College of Humanities & Fine Arts
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This course examines the cultural origins of hip hop and how this small, minority, Bronx-based subculture expanded into one of the most influential styles of music in the world.
In this course, we will examine the global diffusion of the Creole architectural typology, from its emergence in the Spanish Caribbean to its florescence in British and French India.
In this class, we will employ an applied microeconomics perspective to try to understand the hierarchies and operation of race and gender in society.
It’s a subculture often dismissed with a punch line: Nigerian youth who email unsuspecting victims and convince them to send money in return for nonexistent goods or deals. This semester, 25 Amherst students looked beyond the punch line to the young perpetrators of the infamous scam.
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