Department: African Studies

Code Name Description
AFRICAST111 Education for All? The Global and Local in Public Policy Making in Africa Policy making in Africa and the intersection of policy processes and their political and economic dimensions. The failure to implement agreements by international institutions, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations to promote educat...
AFRICAST112 AIDS, Literacy, and Land: Foreign Aid and Development in Africa Foreign aid can help Africa, say the advocates. Certainly not, say the critics. Is foreign aid a solution? or a problem? Should there be more aid, less aid, or none at all? Africa has developed imaginative and innovative approaches in many sectors. A...
AFRICAST113V Freedom in Chains: Black Slavery in the Atlantic, 1400s-1800s This course will focus on the history of slavery in the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch Atlantic world(s), from the late 1400s to the 1800s. Its main focus will be on the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Between...
AFRICAST114N Desert Biogeography of Namibia Prefield Seminar Desert environments make up a third of the land areas on Earth, ranging from the hottest to the coldest environments. Aridity leads to the development of unique adaptations among the organisms that inhabit them. Climate change and other processes o...
AFRICAST115 Excavating Enslavement This is a project-based course, intended to scaffold a joint initiative, Aftermaths of Enslavement: curating legacies publicly. Both course and project seek to better understand enslaved pasts by (a) curating materials that advance scholarly research...
AFRICAST117 African Archive Beyond Colonization From street names to monuments, the material sediments of colonial time can be seen, heard, and felt in the diverse cultural archives of ancient and contemporary Africa. This seminar aims to examine the role of ethnographic practice in the political...
AFRICAST119 Novel Perspectives on South Africa 21st-century South Africa continues its literary effervescence. In this class we'll sample some recent novels and related writings to tease out the issues shaping the country (and to some degree the continent) at present. Is `South African literature...
AFRICAST122F Histories of Race in Science and Medicine at Home and Abroad This course has as its primary objective, the historical study of the intersection of race, science and medicine in the US and abroad with an emphasis on Africa and its Diasporas in the US. By drawing on literature from history, science and technolog...
AFRICAST132 Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connectio...
AFRICAST134 Museum Cultures: Exhibiting the African Imaginary Museums are dynamic spaces with the potential to reinvent, rehabilitate, and recenter marginalized people and collections. This year, our seminar examines and enacts museum stewardship of material cultures of diverse African communities across space,...
AFRICAST135 Designing Research-Based Interventions to Solve Global Health Problems The excitement around social innovation and entrepreneurship has spawned numerous startups focused on tackling world problems, particularly in the fields of education and health. The best social ventures are launched with careful consideration paid t...
AFRICAST142 Challenging the Status Quo: Social Entrepreneurs Advancing Democracy, Development and Justice This community-engaged learning class is part of a broader Program on Social Entrepreneurship at the Haas Center for Public Service. It will use practice to better inform theory about how innovation can help address societies biggest challenges. Work...
AFRICAST195 Shifting Frames This is a student driven, dialogue based, and intellectual community focused course. We will explore and challenge the taken-for-granted framing of key African issues and debates. Engagement with discussion leaders drawing on their own research and c...
AFRICAST199 Independent Study or Directed Reading May be repeated for credit.
AFRICAST200 Doing Religious History What is religion, and how do we write its history? This undergraduate colloquium uses case studies from a variety of regions and periods - but with a specific focus on the African continent - to consider how historians have dealt with the challenge o...
AFRICAST202 Moving the Message: Reading and embodying the works of bell hooks In this course, we will spend time reading, discussing and embodying the work of Black feminist theorist and teacher bell hooks. hook's work focuses on practices rooted in Black feminism, the role of love in revolutionary politics, rescuing ourselves...
AFRICAST211 Education for All? The Global and Local in Public Policy Making in Africa Policy making in Africa and the intersection of policy processes and their political and economic dimensions. The failure to implement agreements by international institutions, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations to promote educat...
AFRICAST212 AIDS, Literacy, and Land: Foreign Aid and Development in Africa Foreign aid can help Africa, say the advocates. Certainly not, say the critics. Is foreign aid a solution? or a problem? Should there be more aid, less aid, or none at all? Africa has developed imaginative and innovative approaches in many sectors. A...
AFRICAST215 Excavating Enslavement This is a project-based course, intended to scaffold a joint initiative, Aftermaths of Enslavement: curating legacies publicly. Both course and project seek to better understand enslaved pasts by (a) curating materials that advance scholarly research...
AFRICAST219 Novel Perspectives on South Africa 21st-century South Africa continues its literary effervescence. In this class we'll sample some recent novels and related writings to tease out the issues shaping the country (and to some degree the continent) at present. Is `South African literature...
AFRICAST220E Renaissance Africa Literature, art, and culture in Central/Southern Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Emphasis on forms of exchange between Europeans and Africans in the Kingdom of Kongo and Angola. Readings in Portuguese and English. Taught in Eng...
AFRICAST234 Museum Cultures: Exhibiting the African Imaginary Museums are dynamic spaces with the potential to reinvent, rehabilitate, and recenter marginalized people and collections. This year, our seminar examines and enacts museum stewardship of material cultures of diverse African communities across space,...
AFRICAST235 Designing Research-Based Interventions to Solve Global Health Problems The excitement around social innovation and entrepreneurship has spawned numerous startups focused on tackling world problems, particularly in the fields of education and health. The best social ventures are launched with careful consideration paid t...
AFRICAST242 Challenging the Status Quo: Social Entrepreneurs Advancing Democracy, Development and Justice This community-engaged learning class is part of a broader Program on Social Entrepreneurship at the Haas Center for Public Service. It will use practice to better inform theory about how innovation can help address societies biggest challenges. Work...
AFRICAST248 Religion, Radicalization and Media in Africa since 1945 What are the paths to religious radicalization, and what role have media- new and old- played in these conversion journeys? We examine how Pentecostal Christians and Reformist Muslims in countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia ha...
AFRICAST249 Bodies, Technologies, and Natures in Africa This interdisciplinary course explores how modern African histories, bodies, and natures have been entangled with technological activities. Viewing Africans as experts and innovators, we consider how technologies have mediated, represented, or perfor...
AFRICAST262 Doing the History of Gender and Sexuality: African Perspectives What are gender and sexuality, and how do understandings of these concepts shape human experience across time and space? This course explores major topics in the history of gender and sexuality, with a focus on Africa. Course materials examine a rang...
AFRICAST299 Independent Study or Directed Reading No Description Set
AFRICAST302 Research Workshop Required for African Studies master's students. Student presentations.
AFRICAST303E Infrastructure & Power in the Global South In the last decade, the field of infrastructure studies has entered into conversation with area studies, post/colonial studies, and other scholarship on the "Global South." These intersections have produced dramatic new understandings of what "infras...
AFRICAST348 Religion, Radicalization and Media in Africa since 1945 What are the paths to religious radicalization, and what role have media- new and old- played in these conversion journeys? We examine how Pentecostal Christians and Reformist Muslims in countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia ha...
AFRICAST46N Show and Tell: Creating Provenance Histories of African Art Provenance refers to the chain of custody of a particular art object during its lifetime. Put another way, provenance refers to all the individuals, communities, and institutions who have owned (both legally and illegally), kept, stored, exhibited, d...
AFRICAST58 Egypt in the Age of Heresy Perhaps the most controversial era in ancient Egyptian history, the Amarna period (c.1350-1334 BCE) was marked by great sociocultural transformation, notably the introduction of a new 'religion' (often considered the world's first form of monotheism)...
AFRICAST90 Black Earth Rising: Law and Society in Postcolonial Africa Is the International Criminal Court a neocolonial institution? Should African art in Western museums be returned? Why have anti-homosexuality laws emerged in many African countries? This course engages these questions, and more, to explore how Africa...