Students will be introduced to the evidence and debates surrounding the claims that racialized and poor communities disproportionately shoulder society's environmental burdens. Through a variety of analytical and contextual lenses, we examine fundamental environmental problems faced by individuals and communities of color and the policies and initiatives designed to address them.

This course will focus on recent African arrivals to the United States, exploring the history of Africans who voluntarily entered the country. We will examine the lives of Africans who came to the US in the late 19th, 20th, and 21st century as students, visitors, missionaries, & temporary residents, as well as the reasons for African migration, settlement patterns and adjustment issues, and immigrant relationships with Americans, black and white.

In this course, we will trace the history of reggae music and explore its influence on the development of Jamaican literature. With readings on Jamaican history, we will consider why so many reggae songs speak about Jah and quote from the Bible. Then, we will explore how Marcus Garvey's teachings led to the rise of Rastafarianism, which in turn seeded ideas of black pride and black humanity into what would become reggae music.

This course is dedicated to examining government responses to environmental injustice. Our readings and discussions will use an interdisciplinary social-science perspective to track the trajectory of environmental justice activism and official responses to it in the five states (DE, MD, PA, VA, WVA) the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has designated as comprising the important but understudied mid-Atlantic region.

In this course, we will read a sampling of some exciting new works of fiction from Africa's young and established writers. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that African writers use to narrate issues affecting the continent such as dictatorship, the lingering effects of colonization, the postcolonial nation state, the traumas of war and geo-politics, religion, gender and sexuality, and migration, among others.

This course explores themes and issues in the lives of women in Africa. These include women in early African history, culture, and the role of gender in Africa, encounter with Islam and the West, womens search for autonomy, etc. Emphasis is placed, as much as is possible, on the perspectives of women, how they view their history and their ongoing struggle for self-determination.

How do movies, viral videos, and memes impact the material lives of Black girls? This course offers an introduction to the emergent and growing field of Black Girlhood Studies, especially in relation to media representation and engagement. The course will cover foundational texts about Black girlhood alongside a range of media to explore the ways in which Black girlhood has been constructed and portrayed through these platforms.

Students in the Distinguished Majors Program should enroll in this course for their first semester of thesis research.

Reading, class discussion, and research on a special topic in African-American and African Studies culminating in the composition of a research paper. Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year AAS and History students--double majors and others. Crosslisted with the History major seminar.

This is a supervised research course without formal classroom instruction.