The Department of African American Studies aims to provide students throughout the University with critical, interdisciplinary, and specialized knowledge about African and African American populations and its communities. Our curriculum, programming, and scholarship examines, explores, and engages the intellectual traditions within the African Diaspora from multiple perspectives-historical, cultural, philosophical, political, social, and theoretical-in service to its students and society.​<br><br>An indispensable part of the mission of a metropolitan university, the Department of African American Studies provides a comprehensive liberal arts education by training our students to appreciate diversity and multicultural American society. Our unique interdisciplinary curriculum focuses on the areas of: race & technology, interracial intimacies and mixed race identity in the U.S., politics, urbanization, religion, U.S. history, sociology, psychology, African historypolitics, gender, the civil rights movement, and general education courses. Our faculty contributes to scholarship in the field, and we are intellectually and professionally linked to local and national African American communities through our membership and support of professional associations such as the National Council for Black Studies, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, (ASALH), the Association for Ethnic Studies, among others.