Africana Studies

Africana Studies is the oldest multidisciplinary program at Vassar College.

Over its fifty-five years of existence, Africana Studies at Vassar has evolved from a multidisciplinary study of the civil rights movement in the United States into an intellectual pursuit seeking to understand Pan-African liberatory consciousness, radical aesthetics, and resistance to colonialism.

Our program’s faculty pursue a wide range of research interests, including prison abolition, black feminism, black ecologies, black autobiography, black music, and black filmmaking. We also offer courses focusing on the Creole worlds, Postcolonial African diplomacy, North Africa and South America as geographies of black displacement and spaces of encounter and cross-hybridization with other world cultures, ethnicities, races, religions, and imperial projects.

In the best Vassar tradition, students completing the Africana Studies Major or one of our three correlates—Africana Studies, Prison Studies, and/or Arabic Language and Culture—will have learned to think critically and be engaged as global citizens. Our alums are able to build successful careers as community organizers, artists, academics, human rights activists, social workers, urban planners, lawyers, and so much more.