Welcome from the Director
Michele Elam, Director
Greetings African & African American Studies majors and minors! This year we are making personalized attention to each of our students, with special emphasis on student advising, mentorship, and opportunities for student research and community leadership. I look forward to seeing each of you again (and for our new students, for the first time!) at in one-on-one conferences through out the year with myself and Associate Director, Dr. Cheryl Brown, and to seeing you all at the many exciting Race Forward events, with our special focus this year on the theme of race and faith.
We adopted new AAAS logo last year—we found the Sankofa bird, the symbol
of moving forward while always keeping an eye to the past and its importance,
a fitting representation for AAAS as we both reflect back on our forty
years and also forward in this new millennium.
New Curriculum & Nationally Renowned Scholarship
Over fifty prestigious and award-winning faculty from over twenty disciplines
participate in African & African American Studies. Our Program is highly
interdisciplinary and integrated into all fields of study across campus
and across the curriculum; affiliated faculty offer cross-listed classes
in every realm of intellectual inquiry, from Business to Sociology to Art
and Literature. AAAS offers a field of study that explores the experiences
of people of African descent in Black Atlantic societies, including the
United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Courses in the program
explore and analyze the rich, complex, and distinctively African American
social structures and cultural traditions that Africans in the Diaspora
have created. Students are exposed to the historical, cultural, literary,
political, economic, and social development of people of African descent
in the Americas.
We aim to provide students with an outstanding, rigorous,
and engaging intellectual experience in which students acquire analytic
skills grounded in a traditional discipline as well as interdisciplinary
skills of investigation and research. African American Studies offers training
of special interest to those considering admission to graduate or professional
schools and careers in education, literary studies journalism, law, business,
international relations, politics, psychology, anthropology, social science,
theatre, performing arts and cultural studies, among many others. It is
fitting that we pursue these goals in conjunction with Stanford’s Center
for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, to underscore the connectedness
of, and intra-ethnic dynamics between, African Americans and many other
groups and peoples.
To that end, we modified our undergraduate curriculum last year. This new curriculum better reflects both student interests as well as our faculty expertise in the latest scholarship of the African American and Africana Studies. We worked to make the requirements more transparent, more in line with peer programs at Stanford, and easier to fulfill for those double-majoring or minoring.
Centers of Gravity
An
important part of my role involves cultivating an even stronger, close-knit
community of undergraduate majors and minors, to make the African & African
American Studies your intellectual and social home at Stanford. In the
next couple years, I will seek to make AAAS a communications clearing house:
if you drop by our office, you will be able to find out about—at a glance—not
only all our events and programs, but also what events are coming up with
our many allied organizations, including the Center for Black Performing
Arts, the Black Community Services Center, the Institute for Diversity
in the Arts, the African Studies Center, the Center for Comparative Studies
in Race & Ethnicity, the Program for Feminist Studies, and many student
groups.
I am always interested in hearing your thoughts about the major,
and about what would make your career here in Stanford’s African & African
American Studies Program exciting, challenging, and memorable. Please do
not hesitate to drop by my during office hours or to email me: melam@stanford.edu.
