Spring 2027 Undergraduate Courses in African and African American Studies
AFAS 1130: Introduction to Race
Instructor: John Mundell
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 11:00 - 12:20 PM
This introductory course explores key issues in AFAS, examining the artistic, cultural, and historical expressions of Africa and its diaspora.
Credits: 3
AFAS 1620: Beginning Swahili
Instructor: Mungai Mutonya
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 2:30–3:50 PM
This course examines graffiti from its emergence in 1970s New York to its role in global protest movements, exploring it as art, vandalism, political discourse, and a form of public monument
Credits: 3
AFAS 1640: Wolof Language and Culture
Instructor: El Hadji Diallo
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 4:00–5:20 PM
This course examines how public monuments and commemorative landscapes shape racial memory and inequality while serving as key sites of anti-racist activism.
Credits: 3
AFAS 2140: Juvenile Justice in the Black Experience
Instructor: Geoff Ward
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 1:00–2:20 PM
This course examines the sociolegal past, present, and future of American juvenile justice through the Black American experience. It is organized into three parts covering the parental state's rise, contemporary challenges, and possible futures of youth justice.
Credits: 3
AFAS 2550: Introduction to Africana Studies
Instructor: Zachary Manditch-Prottas
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 11:30–12:50 PM
This course explores the history, culture, and experiences of people of African ancestry worldwide. It examines their influence on society through history, politics, literature, and the arts.
Credits: 3
Requirement: Major/Minor Requirement
AFAS 3003: From Shaft to Django: The History of Blaxploitation Film
Instructor: Zachary Manditch-Prottas
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 8:30–9:50 AM
This course historically contextualizes and critically examines the Blaxploitation phenomenon of the 1970s, exploring its emergence, peak popularity, controversies, rapid demise, and lasting influence on Black culture. While primarily a film course emphasizing close readings of canonical Blaxploitation cinema, it also explores soundtracks, Black pulp fiction novels, promotional aesthetics from the Black Film Promotional Material Collection, and the movement's influence on later cultural movements like the 1990s renaissance.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3062: Islam, Culture, and Society in West Africa
Instructor: El Hadji Diallo
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 1:00 PM–2:20 PM
This course examines the history and spread of Islam in West Africa from the 10th century to the present. It explores how Islam shaped West African society, politics, culture, and religious traditions.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3105: Transnational Black Feminisms
Instructor: Kia Caldwell
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 1:00–2:20 PM
This course uses social science approaches to explore the development of Black feminist thought and activism in diverse cultural and national contexts. Students will gain knowledge of Black feminist thought, writings, and activism in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Course topics will include reproductive justice, land and housing, mothering, sexuality, and public policy.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3113: Culture, Politics, and Society in Francophone Africa
Instructor: El Hadji Diallo
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 1:00–2:20 PM
This course explores the historical relationship between France and Africa, focusing on colonialism, race, and cultural movements. It also examines post-independence politics, immigration, and France’s continuing influence in Francophone Africa.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3130: African Civilization 1800 to the Present
Instructor: Timothy Parsons
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 11:30–12:50 PM
Beginning with social and economic changes in 19th Century Africa, this course is an in-depth investigation of the intellectual and material culture of colonialism. It is also concerned with the survival of pre-colonial values and institutions, and examines the process of African resistance and adaptation to social change. The survey concludes with the consequences of decolonization and an exploration of the roots of the major problems facing modern Africa.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3140: Urban Inequality: Racism, Segregation, & Ghettoization in the American City
Instructor: Candace Borders
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 8:30–9:50 AM
This course examines the causes, development, and consequences of urban inequality in the U.S., focusing on the African-American urban experience and the ghetto. Drawing primarily from sociology and history while incorporating other disciplines, it explores urban inequality across cities including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, D.C., Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, Oakland, and St. Louis.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3201: Race, Education, & Inequality: From Segregation to Reform
Instructor: Timothy Parsons
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 4:00–5:20 PM
A survey of African civilizations and cultures from the Neolithic period to 1800, introducing key historical methods and debates in African history.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3320: Visualizing Blackness: Histories of the African Diaspora Through Film
Instructor: Sowande Mustakeem
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 2:30 –3:50 PM
The African Diaspora and more importantly variations of Blackness, Black bodies, and Black culture have long captured the imagination of audiences across the globe. This course - one of the oldest Black film classes - bridges the world of history, film, and culture to explore where and how historical themes specific to African descended peoples are generated on screen. Moving from the slave trade through to contemporary Black movements and icons, students will be emboldened on herstory and history, while likewise seeing and activating futures of new remembrance
Credits: 3
AFAS 3370: Shut Up & Dribble: Racial Capitalism & the NBA
Instructor: Jonathan Fenderson
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 11:30–12:50 PM
A survey of African American theater from the post–Civil War era to the Black Arts Movement, examining major playwrights and the development of Black theatrical traditions.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3385: Emerging Africa: Language, Identity, and Social Change
Instructor: Mungai Mutonya
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 4:00–5:20 PM
This course explores Africa’s linguistic history and the role of language in shaping identity and society. It examines the influence of urban slang and pidgins across several African countries.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3575: Afro-Latin America on Camera
Instructor: John Mundell
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 4:00–5:20 PM
This course examines how still and moving photography has registered blackness in Latin America as a structure, experience, and representation often neglected in popular media. Through films, video, and photography spanning multiple genres, it questions Latin America's racial exceptionalism narratives like mestizaje and racial democracy while exploring how image-making becomes a means to claim rights, document Black life, and make blackness known within the Latin American nation-state.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3644: Look Here, Karen: The Politics of Black Digital Resistance to White Feminity
Instructor: Raven Lloyd
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 11:30 –12:50 PM
This course explores how Black online communities use memes, humor, and digital activism to challenge white femininity and its historical relationship with policing and racial inequality. Through the lens of internet “Karen” culture, students will examine issues of race, gender, class, and resistance while developing skills to collect and analyze digital content within a broader historical context.
Credits: 3
AFAS 3655: Black Conservatives and Their Discontent: African Americans and Conservatism in America
Instructor: Gerald Early
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 11:30 –12:50 PM
This course examines Black conservatism, including its beliefs about race, politics, religion, and individual responsibility. It explores debates between Black conservatives and liberals about racial identity, civil rights, and solutions to inequality
Credits: 3
AFAS 4009: Slavery and Public History
Instructor: Kelly Schmidt
Time: Monday/Wednesday, 10:00 –11:20 AM
This course teaches public history practice, emphasizing the public history of slavery through research and interpretation on regional histories of enslavement in St. Louis and at Washington University. Students engage critical scholarship and learn core tenets of public history interpretation, museum best practices, oral history, preservation, and material culture while grappling with the politics of memory and how white supremacy has shaped public understandings of history.
Credits: 3
AFAS 4010: Who's Afraid of Black Marxism? The crises of capitalism and futures of solidarity
Instructor: Samuel Shearer
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 2:30–3:50 PM
This course offers a critical introduction to the origins, methods, and debates among international scholars and activists who bring Global Black Studies and Marxism together, centered on Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism and its interrogation of racial capitalism. It explores how these debates speak to today's interconnected crises of climate, politics, and capitalism—asking whether capitalism is inherently racial—while tracing heterodox Black Marxist traditions from twentieth-century Black Power and anti-colonial movements to twenty-first-century prison abolition and the climate crisis.
Credits: 3
AFAS 4270: What is Africanfuturism? 21st Century African Speculative Fiction
Instructor: Samuel Shearer
Time: Tuesday/Thursday, 4:00–5:20 PM
This course explores African futurism through African literature, speculative fiction, and art. It examines how African creators imagine futures centered on African identity, culture, technology, and history.
Credits: 3
AFAS 4465: Black Life and the Law
Instructors: Adrienne Davis
Time: Wednesday, 3:00–5:50 PM
This course examines the intersection of U.S. law and Black life, exploring how legal frameworks have shaped and been shaped by Black experiences historically and in the contemporary context. Through historical analysis, theoretical inquiry, and legal case studies, students investigate law's role in reinforcing and challenging racial inequality while exploring Black resistance, social movements, and political strategies.
Credits: 3
AFAS 4501: Senior Seminar
Instructor: Kia Caldwell
Time: Wednesday, 3:00–5:50 PM
This capstone seminar is required for students who are majoring in African and African-American Studies.
Credits: 3
Requirement: Major/Minor Requirement
AFAS 4999: Independent Study: Topics in Black Studies (Black Intellectual Traditions, Democracy, and the American University)
Instructor: Kia Caldwell; Alex Keith
Time: Thursday, 3:00–5:50 PM
This seminar explores the relationship between Black Studies, academic freedom, democracy, and the American university. Through Black intellectual traditions, contemporary debates, guest speakers, and community engagement, students will examine how Black Studies challenges institutional inequalities, expands knowledge production, and reimagines the university’s role in society.
Credits: 3