Undergraduate

African and African American Studies (AAAS) at Dartmouth is a multi-disciplinary department of innovative scholarship, offering courses that integrate theoretical perspectives across disciplines. Students in AAAS explore the historical, social, political, and cultural constructions and transformations of Africa, the African Diaspora, and their global contexts. The Department was founded as a program in 1969.  

Learning Outcomes for the AB in African and African American Studies

By graduation, students will be able to:

  1. Apply disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods of research, independent thinking, and critical analysis to a rigorous study of experiences throughout Africa and the African diaspora 
  2. Identify important features of a variety of cultures, past and present, across Africa and the African diaspora

  3. Explain the interrelationship between people from sub-Saharan Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, and/or other parts of the African diaspora in following areas: historical, intellectual, political, economic, cultural.

  4. Be able to describe the role of key concepts such as intersectionality, power, and difference via specific connections with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender.

  5. Define and provide examples of colonization, decolonization, liberation or power movements and their legacies.

  6. Gain knowledge of emergent ideas and scholarship about the lives and conditions of people of African descent throughout the globe

  7. Demonstrate an awareness of current social justice initiatives involving people of African descent both in the United States and throughout the world.