Welcome from the Associate Director
Cheryl A. Brown, Associate Director
Welcome to Stanford’s Program in African and African American Studies.
As the first ethnic studies program at Stanford, AAAS has a time honored role in the university. Students who agitated to begin the Program and faculty who organized and continue to sustain it all have strived to make sure all institutions recognize the importance of the study of peoples of African descent.
As with similar ethnic departments and programs, AAAS began by questioning and re-writing dominant historical and cultural paradigms. Our Program continues to explore the myriad experiences, expressions, needs, and global impacts of people of the African Diaspora. For example, AAAS majors can focus their studies on the Caribbean, mixed race communities, African American culture, or African arts (see thematic emphases in requirements for the major). In addition, AAAS is solidly based in the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), which pushes students to understand how Africans, African Americans, and Africa’s Diaspora contribute to our understanding of race and ethnicity. AAAS majors thus take courses on race theory and can focus their intellectual pursuits in this arena.
The AAAS Program requires majors to build a firm foundation through the examination of African and African American history and culture. It then encourages students to create thematic emphases among topics of particular intellectual interest. It is a truly interdisciplinary program that emphasizes intellectual rigor, cultivates perspectives that enhance abilities to question and make sound judgments, and introduces a broad set of skills that can be applied to graduate study, business, the arts, diplomacy, medicine, policy making, and law.
You are most welcome to visit our lounge and library, to talk to us about the major and minor, and to take an AAAS course.
