2025-2026 Academic Year

Fall 2025

AFST 200 Approaches to Africana Studies
This course will investigate the importance of conceptual analysis and the development of concepts in the theoretical and textual research of Africana Studies. Thus, the course will focus on various interpretive frameworks and approaches to organizing and understanding Africana Studies, including but not limited to the African model, Afrocentricity, diaspora model, critical race theory, post-modernism, and post colonialism. Prerequisite: 100.

AFST 220 African American Foodways
This course examines the multifarious ways in which food has influenced the expressions of African American identity and culture. We will begin with a discussion of food as a cultural connector that preserves the ties between African Americans and their African antecedents. Subsequently, we will consider specific African American culinary practices and the origins of soul food. Additionally, we will analyze the roles of food in African American social activism. In so doing, we will pay particular attention to the relationships that exist among food consumption, human rights, and African American communal health, as represented by the anti-soul food and black vegetarianism/veganism movements.

WGSS 301 Toni Morrison
Cross-listed with AFST 320-02. This course is part one of a yearlong exploration of the imaginative and critical works of Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. During the semester, we will trace Morrison's development as a novelist from 1970-2000, paying particular attention to the ways in which she crafts her novels and employs them to provide provocative commentaries on Black identity and culture. In our analyses of these works, we will use such critical approaches as psychoanalytic theory, Black feminism, and new historicism.

AFST 320 Toni Morrison
Cross-listed with WGSS 301-03. This course is part one of a yearlong exploration of the imaginative and critical works of Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. During the semester, we will trace Morrison's development as a novelist from 1970-2000, paying particular attention to the ways in which she crafts her novels and employs them to provide provocative commentaries on Black identity and culture. In our analyses of these works, we will use such critical approaches as psychoanalytic theory, Black feminism, and new historicism.

AFST 500 Independent Study