The mission of the Department of African American Studies is to contribute to an inclusive intellectual environment at Ohio University by developing and delivering an interdisciplinary curriculum that advances the university’s General Education goals and provides students with a complex appreciation of the African American experience, including its domestic and global dimensions, especially connections with the African Diaspora in the Americas. The curriculum is rooted in the history of the African American experience and is committed to providing students with competencies and skills to respond to the contemporary challenges facing a multicultural and globally interdependent American society.
Our more specific learning objectives include the following:
- Students will have a sound knowledge-base of African Americans as a community that has had a singular national experience and they will develop a nuanced understanding of the implications of that experience for African Americans, for other peoples of color and for the nation at large.
- Students will have the knowledge and skills that will enable them to pursue advanced studies in African American Studies, and/or in the other related disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences.
- Students will have the skills and knowledge that enable them to find employment in a wide array of fields requiring a liberal arts education and the ability to adapt to a rapidly-changing work environment.
- Students will have a sharpened sense of civic responsibility, especially in relation to issues of equality and justice, as well as migration and urbanization.
- Students who take our extensive offerings in General Education will learn from those courses how to run necessary and meaningful interventions centered in their special understandings of “race”, class and gender in debates on all aspects of national and global history and contemporary life.