Fall 2026 Advising Guide – African American Studies

Registration for the Fall 2026 semester will begin on Tuesday, April 7, 2026 and runs through Friday, April 17, 2026. Please be sure to check your PAWS account to determine when you are eligible to register.

IMPORTANT LINKS

Summer 2026 Course List

Course	Title	Day/Time	Start Date	End Date	Session	Instructor	Class Number
AAS 252-101	GENDER, RACE & CULTURAL PRODUCTION (crosslisted with WGS 252-101)	Asynchronous online	05/26/2026	06/12/2026	Session 1 (3 week mini-session)	Adair,Zakiya	60093
AAS 252-201	GENDER, RACE & CULTURAL PRODUCTION (crosslisted with WGS 252-201)	Asynchronous online	06/15/2026	07/16/2026	Session 2 (1st 5 -week session)	Adair,Zakiya	60094
AAS 353-101	ADV. CRIMINOLOGY RACE & CRIME (crosslisted with CRI-352-201)	Asynchronous online	05/26/2026	06/12/2026	Session 1 (3 week mini-session)	Mitchell,Michael	60091
AAS 370-201	TOPICS IN AFRICANA STUDIES: AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC - HIP HOP (crosslisted with MUS 370-201)	Asynchronous online	06/15/2026	07/16/2026	Session 2 (1st 5 -week session)	Diggs,Brandi	60059

Fall 2026 Course List

Course	Title	Days	Time	Facil ID	Instructor	Class Number
AAS 150-01	INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL JUSTICE (crosslisted with WGS 150-01)	Mon-Thurs	8:00-9:20am	BLIS153	Brown-Glaude,Winnifred	83038
AAS 150-02	INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL JUSTICE (crosslisted with WGS 150-02)	Mon-Thurs	9:30-10:50am	BLIS153	Brown-Glaude,Winnifred	83039
AAS 179-01	AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY to 1865 (crosslisted with HIS 179-01)	Mon-Thurs	9:30-10:50am	SOCI228	Audain,Mekala	83040
AAS 179-02	AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY to 1865 (crosslisted with HIS 179-02)	Mon-Thurs	11:00am-12:20pm	SOCI228	Audain,Mekala	83041
AAS 180-01	AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY 1865 TO PRESENT (crosslisted with HIS 180-01)	Tues-Fri	11:00am-12:20pm	SOCI323	Adair,Zakiya	83042
AAS 348-01	AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC (crosslisted with MUS 370-01 and HON 370-04)	Tues	2:00pm-4:50pm	MUSI 106	Diggs, Brandi	83491
AAS 363-01	SCHOOL TO PRISON PIPELINE (crosslisted with CRI 363-01)	Tues	5:30pm-8:20pm	SOCI328	Mitchell,Michael	83045
AAS 370-01	TOPICS IN AFRICANA STUDIES: BLACK WOMEN PRISONERS (crosslisted with CRI 370-05 & WGS 370-01)	Mon-Thurs	11:00am-12:20pm	BLIS147	Francis,Leigh-Anne	83185
AAS 370-02	TOPICS IN AFRICANA STUDIES: RACISM, CRIME & PRISONS (crosslisted with CRI 370-04 & WGS 370-02)	Mon-Thurs	12:30pm-1:50pm	BLIS147	Francis,Leigh-Anne	83186
AAS 370-03	TOPICS IN AFRICANA STUDIES: BRUJAS AND BLACKNESS (crosslisted with WGS 308)	Mon-Thurs	12:30pm-1:50pm	BLIS 152	Francis,Leigh-Anne	83519
AAS 375-01	BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHT (crosslisted with WGS 365)	Tues-Fri	3:30-4:50pm	SOCI241	Adair,Zakiya	83046
AAS 377-01	AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1920 (crosslisted with LIT 377-01)	Mon-Thurs	11:00am-12:20pm	BLIS153	Kendrix-Williams,Piper	83082
AAS 377-02	AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1920 (crosslisted with LIT 377-02)	Mon-Thurs	12:30pm-1:50pm	BLIS153	Kendrix-Williams,Piper	83083
AAS 499-01	AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES CAPSTONE (crosslisted with LIT 499-05)	Mon-Thurs	2:00pm-3:20pm	BLIS153	Kendrix-Williams,Piper	83084

AAS Course Descriptions

AAS 150 / Introduction to Social Justice

This introductory course examines how racism, classism, sexism, ableism and other patterns of inequality intersect, and thus create barriers to the realization of a more equal and just society. The course will begin with a theoretical examination of what we mean by justice, social justice and why these matter. Students will then examine the social constructions of gender, race, and sexuality and how they are shaped by particular contexts, times, and places. Using an intersectional framework, the course will then examine pressing current social justice issues such as poverty, race and incarceration, immigration, etc. and how the intersectionality of social identities and forces amplify the impact of these issues on oppressed populations. Students will examine strategies to create change, including organizing, campaigns, and advocacy. Crosslisted with WGS 150.

AAS 179 / African American History to 1865

An examination of the history of African Americans from their ancestral home in Africa to the end of the United States Civil War. The course encompasses introducing the cultures and civilizations of the African people prior to the opening up of the New World and exploring black contributions to America up to 1865. Crossslisted with HIS 179.

AAS 180 / African American History 1865 to Present

An examination of the history of African Americans from the end of slavery in the United States to the civil rights revolution of 1950s and 1960s. The course is designed to explore the history of African Americans since the Reconstruction and their contributions to the civil rights revolution of the present era. Crossslisted with HIS 180.

AAS 252 / Gender, Race, & Cultural Production (Summer Session 1, 2)
This course provides an overview of the various performance genre made popular in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century by African Americans. The course will make explicit connections between black diasporic cultural production and intellectualism during the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. Crosslisted with WGS 252.

AAS 348 / African American Music (formerly AAS 370: Special Topics) 

This course will present a comprehensive overview of Hip Hop music along with its musical styles, artists, and the multiplicity of Black music styles and genres that shaped the genre including but not limited to: The Negro Spiritual, Blues, Gospel and Jazz. The course is open to music majors and non-music majors. No prior musical training or knowledge is required. Crosslisted with MUS 370

AAS 353 / Advanced Criminology: Race & Crime (Summer Session 2)

A critical examination of the correlation between race and crime in America.  The course will focus on four major areas: race and the law, race and criminological theory, race and violent crime, and myths and facts about race and crime.  Through critical examination of readings and official statistics, students will come to understand the complexity of the relationship between race and crime within the American Criminal Justice System and broader social context. Crosslisted with CRI 352.

AAS 363 / School to Prison Pipeline

The school-to-prison pipeline (SPP) trend involves a set of disciplinary measures, typically beginning in the classroom, which disproportionately place primarily youth of color on pathways to incarceration rather than institutions of higher education. Youth, primarily students of color, experience ‘ubiquitous criminalization’ from “a system in which schools, police, probation officers, families, community centers, the media, businesses, and other institutions systematically treat young people’s everyday behaviors as criminal activity (Rios, 2011, p. xiv). Through an interdisciplinary and critical lens, we will examine the construction of this pipeline and its relation to racial, gender, and socioeconomic inequalities in U.S. public schooling that affect our communities. Crosslisted with CRI 363.

AAS 370 / Topics in Africana Studies:

Topics offered in the Summer and Fall of 26:

*African American Music (Summer 2026)

This course will present a comprehensive overview of African American music along with its musical styles, artists, and multiplicity of genres including but not limited to: The Negro Spiritual, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, R&B, Hip Hop, and Rap. Beginning with its West African origins until present day, the course will enable students to examine how socioeconomic, political, and technological developments influenced the trajectory of African American music. In addition, the course will introduce basic tools to analyze African American music to showcase its impact on American culture and history. The course is open to music majors and non-music majors. No prior musical training or knowledge is required.

*Black Women Prisoners in US History (Fall 2026)

*Race, Crime, & Prisons (Fall 2026)

This course draws on legal, social, cultural, political, and sociological history, Whiteness, African American, Puerto Rican, Women/Gender, Indigenous, Queer, and Transgender Studies in order to guide students in an intersectional analysis of crime and punishment in the United States. In this course, students explore the ways in which historical racism shapes perceptions of crime, particularly racist stereotypes about Black criminality and the mythology (or assumption) of white innocence, racist fictions that drive the mass imprisonment of people of color in the U.S. today. The course begins with an examination of the slavery institution as the U.S.’s first mass incarceration system, the genocide against Indigenous people that facilitated slavery’s expansion, the accelerated growth of the South’s prison system after slavery’s abolition, and the forced labor (or neo-enslavement) of imprisoned Blacks in the Jim Crow South. The semester concludes with an investigation of the 1970s to present, an era that some scholars and activists call the “New Jim Crow.” Students will analyze the school-to-prison pipeline in impoverished Puerto Rican communities, the racially targeted “War on Drugs” from the 1970s to present, police discrimination and violence against trans people of color, and imprisoned people’s experiences of the racist sexual terrorism that is fundamental to the U.S. prison system. By the end of the course, students will understand the intersectionality of ideological and institutional racist-classism and racist-sexist-classism as forces funneling impoverished people of color into prisons at disproportionately high rates. Racist media representations of Blacks, Latinx’s, Indigenous people, Asian Americans, and Arab Americans wrongly justify the racist over-policing of poor neighborhoods of color, police violence against people of color, and a violent, non-rehabilitative prison system in which people of color are over-represented. Throughout the course, students confront the reality that white supremacy, white privilege, and the racist terrorizing of communities of color are not phenomena of the past, but institutionalized in the present. In so doing, students are empowered to think critically and creatively about ways to eradicate the social injustices that maintain the racist systemic legal oppression of people of color in the U.S.

*Brujas And Blackness (Fall 2026)

Blackness and brujería are taboo topics within Latinx communities; both typically connote negative imagery and are actively avoided. Recently, the bruja identity has been reclaimed by many AfroLatinx women who see it as an outward expression of their AfroLatinidad and source of personal empowerment. Lara (2005) describes this as a bruja positionality – “the re-membering, revising, and constructing of knowledge as well as participation in other forms of social change…built on healing the internalized desconocimientos that demonize la Bruja and the transgressive spirituality and sexuality that she represents” (p 13). Latinx spiritual practices such as espiritismo, Santeria, Palo Monte, among others, will become avenues through which will explore key themes in Black/Latina/Chicana feminisms, including the politics of representation, stigmatization, multiple forms of state and interpersonal violence, intersecting forms of oppression, economic justice, reproductive justice, queerness/sexuality/lesbianism, and strategies of empowerment and resistance. Through a variety of course materials – academic articles, personal reflections, performance, and art – we will critically examine the construction of Afro-indigenous feminist identities within the contexts of Latin America and the diaspora.

AAS 375 / Black Feminist Thought

This course traces the evolution of feminist consciousness among Africana women.  Students will trace the thoughts, social and political activism and ideologies generated by women of African ancestry from the early 19th Century free black “feminist abolitionists” to contemporary times.  “Womanist,” “Feminist,” “Critical Race Feminist,” and “Black Feminist” ideologies will be emphasized through course readings and assignments that explore the emergence and perpetuation of an Africana women’s feminist consciousness. Crosslisted with WGS 365.

AAS 377 / African American Literature to 1920

A study of selected African American Literature from the colonial period through Reconstruction, this course will build students’ knowledge and confidence as readers and critics of African American literature, culture and society in the United States. We will look at a variety of texts through a lens focused on the effects produced by struggles with American fictions of race, class and sex and their intersections with categories of gender, ethnicity and nation. The course will also explore the canon of African American Literature, its literary traditions, and the connection to and diversions from the canon of American Letters. Crosslisted with LIT 377.

AAS 499 / African American Studies Capstone

*Department Permission Only

The Fall 2026 seminar will explore how Afrofuturism manifests in literature, history, sociology, feminism, and political science, and how the awakening of personal black consciousness can be found there. There is consensus among theorists and scholars that the term “Afrofuturism” was coined in 1994 by Mark Dery, a professor at the Yale School of Art. Dery coined the term in his essay, “Black to the Future.”  In this work, Dery queries: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have been subsequently consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” (180) For Dery, the answer is yes and he finds it in art, comics, science fiction, and the history of Black people and thus coins and claims “Afrofuturism.” Viewing Afrofuturism as an analytic framework is essential to the interdisciplinary nature of this AAS 499 Capstone.

Several contemporary writers and thinkers are invested in the complex interpretation of Afrofuturism as both an idea and a lived reality. This more complex rendering of Black identity and thought informs the theoretical work we will focus on during the semester.  In this course, students will be expected to research and investigate the critical debate surrounding Afrofuturism over the last twenty years. Students will be expected to do two interrelated things in this course: contribute actively and thoughtfully to class discussions of assigned materials, and devote the bulk of their time to formulating their own research project on Afrofuturism.