African American Studies

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AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES

253.879.3372

253.879.6111

Chair

Grace Livingston

253-879-2910

glivingston@pugetsound.edu

Administrative Support

Margaret Birmingham

253.879.3334

mbirmingham@pugetsound.edu

Program Description

How does the experience of African American people inform one’s understanding of contemporary societal interactions and conditions? Why is an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge, such as the African American studies approach, fundamental to critical thinking? What African American voices, experiences, events, communities, policies, and cultural components are under-interrogated, yet essential, for active and informed citizens of the world to understand?

African American (AFAM) studies is interdisciplinary, with focal fields such as history, sociology, English studies, communication studies, political science, psychology, social theory, art, music, economics, education, and even natural sciences, including environmental science, with a social justice lens. In AFAM, students cultivate transdisciplinary skills, develop informed perspectives, and engage with their communities with the guidance of professors.

Who You Could Be

Teacher
Case manager
Financial analyst
Systems analyst
Director of public policy and government affairs
Business development and communications manager

What You'll Learn

African American and other African diasporic experiences
Roles of race, power, difference, and intersectionality
Transdisciplinary skills in analytics and reflexive and community-based methodologies
Interdisciplinary studies, including history, sociology, communications, political science, psychology, social theory, the arts, economics, education, and science

SAMPLE COURSES

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AFAM 101 Introduction to African American Studies

This course provides an examination of intellectual and creative productions, developments, and events that have come to be recognized as the discipline of African American Studies. The course explores literature, history, popular culture (music, television, magazines, newspapers, movies, film documentaries), and politics as a way to identify the historical and political origins and objectives of Black Studies and the 1960s Black Liberation struggles, the early academic and social concerns of Black Studies advocates, the theoretical and critical approaches to Black Studies as a discipline, and the early objectives of Black Studies in relation to present goals of multiculturalism.

Code

Knowledge, Identity, and PowerSocial Scientific and Historical Perspectives

AFAM 305 Black Fictions and Feminisms

This course is an integrative course in the humanities that explores various constructions of black female identity. The course looks at black womanhood as it's represented in the public imaginary, feminist theories, critical race theories, and in literature and literary criticism written by black women writers. One of the questions the course asks is: How have scholars and writers addressed fundamental questions of black female identity? To answer this question, students read and view a wide survey of materials including novels, essays, memoir, and film. Through this investigation, students consider how studies of race, feminism, and gender connect to personal lives.

Code

Social Scientific and Historical Perspectives

Prerequisites

AFAM 101 strongly recommended.

AFAM 360 The Art and Politics of the Civil Rights Era

This course employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore the history and expressive culture of the civil rights era. Emphasizing what historians call the "long civil rights movement," the course explores earlier strategies of resistance, the civil rights and black power movements, and legacies of these movements. An interdisciplinary approach is particularly applicable for a course focused on the civil rights movement because the literature of racial protest and of the "black arts" was not simply parallel to the political upheavals. As Amiri Baraka put it in 1971, "Art is Politics." Readings and assignments engage the complex, sometimes contradictory, legal, political, literary, artistic, and musical responses of this charged historical period, and the intersecting struggles over knowledge, power, and identity.

Code

Connections 200-400 LevelKnowledge, Identity, and Power

AFAM 375 The Harlem Renaissance

This course examines the renaissance of African American literature, music, and visual art that, for the most part, emerges from Harlem, a cultural hub in the 1920s and 1930s. The course also approaches the literature, music, and visual art, as well as the social changes in Harlem, from different disciplinary perspectives, including literary criticism, cultural history, music criticism, art criticism, and aesthetic theory. Students explore social and aesthetic debates that arose during the Harlem Renaissance and connect these to parallel debates today. Students also make connections between and among different artists and thinkers of the period, including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Wallace Thurman, Claude McKay, Sargent Johnson, Romare Bearden, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, and Walter White. The course invites students to make connections between literature, visual art, and music from the period and between the Harlem Renaissance and their own ideas about art and society.

Code

Connections 200-400 LevelKnowledge, Identity, and Power

AFAM 401 Narratives of Race

This course takes as its central object the idea of race. Race is understood as a social construct that designates relations of structural difference and disparity. How race is treated is a crucial issue in this course. It is in this question of 'the how' that the term narrative becomes salient. The term narrative intentionally focuses attention on the material practices through which we have come to define race as a social construct. This terminology, 'narratives of race' spotlights an interest in investigating the historical events and visual and verbal images employed in the linking, patterning, sequencing, and relaying our ways of knowing race and its social relations. Implicated in the construction of race is its production and deployment of the moral and intellectual values that our academic disciplines bear. In considering such values as part of the investigation, this course includes careful comparative analyses of the ways in which the disciplinary systems of ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and politics are used in the making and remaking of the academic and social grammars of race. Thus the analysis necessarily includes an intertextualization of the several academic disciplines engaging the question of race.

Code

Connections 200-400 Level

Students on the Fall 2019 Ghana trip — In January 2020, students from the AFAM 310: African Diaspora Experience class traveled to Ghana, providing students the opportunity to enhance their classroom learning with an immersive and hands-on experience exploring historical, environmental, political, and health- and gender-related issues.

But Some of Us are Brave lecture series poster — The Brave Lecture Series is an annual series at Puget Sound and a platform for female junior scholars of color in honor of Women's History Month.

AFAM 310 students in Ghana, January 2020 — In January 2020, students from the fall 2019 AFAM 310: African Diaspora Experience class traveled to Ghana with Puget Sound faculty and staff members, providing students the opportunity to enhance their classroom learning with an immersive and hands-on experience exploring historical, environmental, political, and health- and gender-related issues.

Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, co-founders of Black Lives Matters, speak at the 2018 Race and Pedagogy National Conference — Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza, co-founders of Black Lives Matter, spoke at the 2018 Race and Pedagogy National Conference on the Puget Sound campus. All students were invited to participate in the conference, and many helped produce it.

Experiential Learning

Students gain experience in a number of ways:

Grant-funded summer research projects, such as:
- Kellen Hagans '24, "Black Platonic Love: The Legacy of Fictive Kin and the Social Family at the University of Puget Sound"
- Maia Nilsson '24, "Mary's Son (A Literary Reflection on Race, Gender, and Filipino-American History)"
Students work with the Race & Pedagogy Institute on campus through AFAM 399: Public Scholarship.
Students traveled to Ghana as part of the AFAM 310: African Diaspora Experience class during fall 2019.

Stories

A Change Is Gonna Come

When Serena Sevasin ’22, Mimi Duncan ’22, and Jaylen Antoine ’22 stepped up into the bed of a pickup truck in the parking lot next to Memorial Fieldhouse and prepared to address the crowd of thousands of people, they knew they…

A Journey to Africa

This is an expanded version of the roundtable discussion that appeared in the spring 2020 issue of Arches. The history of Ghana, on Africa’s western coast, is, in part, a brutal one. From the 1500s through the 1800s,…

Community

Students

University of Puget Sound student advocates for Black voices

In early August, with the summer sun high overhead downtown Tacoma, Chloe Pargmann-Hayes ’24 climbed the steps of Tollefson Plaza with a paint roller in hand to help put the finishing touches on a massive mural. This was the…

Where Graduates Work

Where our graduates work:

Inductive Health Informatics (systems analyst)
Pierce County Alliances (case manager)
Made Up Mind Ministries (vice president)
Thrive Social Justice Consulting (owner)
Marcus & Millichap (financial analyst and transaction coordinator)
Impact Hub Seattle (business developer and communications manager)
Communication Services for the Deaf (director of public policy and government affairs)

Where Graduates Continue Studying

Where our students continue their studies:

Brown University (Ph.D., African American studies)
University of Washington (Master of Library Science)
University of Puget Sound (Master of Arts in Teaching)
Western Governors University (Master of Business Administration)
University of Michigan (Masters in Social Work

Meet The Faculty

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Grace Livingston

Professor and Chair, African American Studies

glivingston@pugetsound.edu

Prof. Livingston's scholarly and teaching interests include Black Atlantic social thought; intersectional foundations of curriculum knowledge production; popular education; and the racialized politics of memory, the archive and the aesthetic.

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Renee Simms

Associate Professor, African American Studies

rsimms@pugetsound.edu

An accomplished writer, essayist, and poet, Prof. Renee Simms teaches courses in African American literature, black feminist theory, and fiction writing.

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LaToya Brackett

Associate Professor, African American Studies, Race and Pedagogy Institute

lbrackett@pugetsound.edu

Prof. Brackett is an avid writer, with work appearing in several publications. Her teaching and research focuses on African American pop culture, intercultural communication, and contemporary issues.

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Nancy Bristow

Professor, History

nbristow@pugetsound.edu

The author of three books, Prof. Bristow focuses on the interplay of identity, inequity, social cataclysm, and change, with particular emphasis on race, in her 20th century American history classes.

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Carolyn Weisz

Professor Emerita, Psychology

cweisz@pugetsound.edu

Carolyn Weisz is a social psychologist with research interests in racism, homelessness, and social perception.

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Robin Jacobson

Professor, Politics and Government

rjacobson@pugetsound.edu

With a focus on immigration, Prof. Jacobson and has published numerous articles and chapters. She teaches on a variety of topics within the context of U.S. politics, including religion, state politics, and race.

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Rachel DeMotts

Professor, Environmental Studies & Sciences

rdemotts@pugetsound.edu

Prof. DeMotts studies and teaches the environmental politics of sub-Saharan Africa, including how people are affected by conservation efforts. She teaches courses in politics and government and environmental policy.

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