Welcome to the Program in African American Studies at UC Irvine. This Program is comprised of comparative pedagogical research in various areas, associated with transnational and global diasporas of Atlantic African cultures. These areas of research include the Caribbean and Central, North, and South Americas, with an emphasis upon African ancestral derived communities established in the New World. The Program in African American Studies offers a major and a minor, with opportunities for any student interested in the subject to explore the African American experience in far deeper levels of exploration.

Our core and affiliated faculty have teaching interests in critical theory, feminist theory, history, legal studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, political economy, visual studies, post colonialism, and transnational and diaspora studies, as well as art history, comparative political thought, drama, and film and media studies. These areas of pedagogy dissect the issues of oppression and struggles of the global African diasporas and their derivative communities, including the variety of modalities of life and the survival strategies involved within their histories. The traditions these colonial communities inherited and developed, especially in the aftermath of the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans in the New World form the subjects of our curriculum.

Therefore much of our pedagogical concerns transcend the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines. African American Studies is an organic interdisciplinary program in its methodology. This Program’s intent is the broadening study of the transatlantic African slavery trade into the Americas. Its importance to cultural influence has become very pertinent to the development of culture upon the New World. This program thus becomes important in the development of provenance in the structural evolution of colonial African diasporas globally within contemporary societal histories. Thus, the Program demonstrates an academic currency as an intellectual instrument of legitimacy that has an imprint upon critical theoretical study within the School of Humanities.

The entire faculty associated with the Program invites you to discover these fields of inquiry that invigorate inspiration to a continuing and growing field of challenging academic research.


Ulysses Jenkins
Director