Welcome to the African American Studies Program (AASP)

"In September 2008 a young English woman visited the program. While on an exchange program at UF last year, she had taken an African American Studies class. Making the rounds to her former professors, she stopped by the African American Studies Program. She informed her former instructor that the course she took from him was the best course she had ever had. It changed the way she thinks about the U.S. - and the world."

A Message from the Director

Last spring we celebrated our 40^th anniversary, and during this academic year we will continue to mark the significance of our presence at the University of Florida. We will advance this agenda by further enhancing our curriculum, which currently offers a minor. Within the coming year we expect to present interested students with the opportunity to major in African American Studies.

We are intensifying our efforts in community building and creating a climate of intellectual vitality that embraces students, faculty, staff, and off-campus friends. Although we are a small program, we offer students the opportunity to learn about past and present experiences of African-descended people in this country as well as in other parts of the African Diaspora.  Informed by  Black experiences and by Black and allied perspectives, our courses prepare students to think critically about U.S. society along with other societies structured in cultural diversity, interlocking stratifications, and disparities of power related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and (trans)national  identity.    We encourage students interested in these kinds of concern to join us in our courses and extracurricular activities.  The program has a dynamic faculty whose research and service enrich how and what they teach—in and beyond the classroom.   

For more details on who we are and what our program is doing, please explore our website and its links to information, photographs, and videos.    

Dr. Faye Harrison

Four Core Principles of our Program

The four core principles of the program combine excellence in scholarship with experiential learning. This structure honors the applied roots of African American Studies and recognizes the broad range of perspectives in the African Diaspora.
AASP's four principles are:

• Interdisciplinarity: This principle encourages a broad base of disciplinary theories, methodologies, and methods. This approach allows each faculty member to begin from their own position of expertise and systematically tie their work to other necessary areas of social science and humanities.
• Community-based learning: This focus honors the applied, experiential, and activist model from which Black Studies programs originally developed. Pedagogies of community service-learning and advocacy scholarship are central to the engaged nature of the program.
• African American experience in a transnational context: With this program foundation, the faculty grounds our main study in the United States, but also understands the imperative to connect the U.S. experience to those of Africa and the wider African Diaspora.
• Critical thinking, writing, and research presentation skills development: The AASP faculty introduce students from all disciplinary areas to African American intellectual history, critical theory, and professional development. Students who enroll in our courses or graduate with an AASP minor will be well versed in the scholarly skills needed to succeed in the next levels of research, teaching, and service in the field.