Annual Ruth First Lecture
"Transforming Higher Education in the Post-COVID Era: Financing, Internationalization, and the AI Revolution" with Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (Howard University).
Featured Content Slideshow
AAAS@55: Making Lives and Building Worlds with Black Studies
The Department of African and African-American Studies invites you to join us in celebrating 55 years of Black Studies at Brandeis University on Thursday, March 27, 2025.
Tillie K. Lubin Symposium: Global African Feminisms in/and the Contemporary Diaspora
Discussion of how a changing world and progressively counter-democratic ideologies and trajectories impact how we theorize, live, teach, and apply gender and feminisms of Africa in/and the US, European, and within the global African diaspora.
Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture: How Do We Already Change the World Through Play? with Professor mattie brice
Games, game design, and gamification gained wide attention as tools for social change work. Focus on play and marginalized folks engaging with it as a survival practice, new alternative realities are possible for art and design activism.
AAAS Newsletter
If interested in obtaining newsletter, please email AAAS Admin Mason at masonr@brandeis.edu
African, African American and Caribbean thinkers have played a major role in defining the critical issues of our time, just as the cultures of Africans and their descendants have transformed the cultures of the Americas and the world.
A concentration in African and African American studies (AAAS) allows you to explore intellectual, cultural, economic, political, social and historical issues related to Africans and people of African descent. Courses are drawn from the humanities and social sciences. Students will develop the analytical tools to read different kinds of texts, to write persuasively and to participate knowledgeably in debates about developments across the African continent, in the Americas and globally.
Undergraduate Program
Our department prides itself on the diversity of disciplines represented by our faculty, which include anthropology, creative arts, economics, history, literature, music, politics and more.
In addition to Introduction to African and African American Studies, AAAS majors take eight courses in history, the arts, social sciences, Africa and African American or the Americas. Students also take an elective, which can be a regularly offered course or a senior essay, senior thesis or independent study.