African and African-American Studies

The Department of African and African American Studies (DAAAS) at Stanford is your gateway to understanding how African and African-descended peoples have shaped the contemporary world and continue to redefine our future— from politics and democracy to arts and culture to science and technology. At DAAAS you will gain the critical skills to think deeply about identity, power, freedom, creativity, innovation, and social responsibility in an interconnected world, all while preparing for a range of meaningful careers and/or graduate school. 

Our faculty, staff, and students value community, fostering an environment where you can thrive both intellectually and personally. When you graduate from DAAAS, you won’t just understand the world—you'll be ready to shape its future. 

Academic Programs and Student Training

Our undergraduate curriculum guides you from foundational learning to specialized expertise and original contribution across three interconnected domains:

• Culture and the Arts: Immerse yourself in literature, music, and visual art, and create original projects that use artistic expression to generate knowledge.

• Science, Technology, and Society: Discover African and diasporic contributions to science and technology while tackling ethical debates around artificial intelligence and environmental justice.

• Ethical, Social, and Political Thought: Engage pressing social and political questions through hands-on research with African and African diasporic communities, connecting theory to real-world impact.

Through Community Engaged Learning, you will carry this inquiry beyond the classroom. Whether through Cardinal Courses, self-designed experiences, or study abroad, you will work with African and African diasporic communities to address shared problems, examine public issues, and learn directly from community members.

Research Themes and Scholarly Focus

DAAAS faculty and researchers are internationally recognized, award-winning scholars and artists whose work spans continents, historical eras, and disciplines. They produce new knowledge through diverse research methods and the creation of original artworks.

African Studies

Faculty explore the histories, literatures, and intellectual traditions of Africa, from early Northwest Africa and Morocco to Southern, West, and Equatorial Africa and the French-speaking Black Atlantic. Their expertise includes African and postcolonial literature and theory, African Christianity, Black women intellectuals, the CIA in Cold War Africa, monuments and collective memory, and histories of family law, citizenship, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. Through work on racial capitalism, slavery, and empire, they place Africa at the center of world history.

African American Studies
Faculty investigate the histories, cultures, and struggles that have shaped African American life in the United States. Their expertise includes African American religion, the civil rights movement, and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.; the FBI and white Christian nationalism; African American literature and Black writers in the global Cold War; race, performance, and property in American popular music; and Black popular culture and contemporary Black feminisms.

African Diaspora Studies
Faculty trace the movements and exchanges that link Africa and its diasporas across the globe. Their expertise includes diaspora and transnational studies, cosmopolitan African cities such as Accra, Black and Caribbean modernist literature, the Atlantic sugar trade, transatlantic religious networks, slavery in the ancient and modern worlds, and archival gaps across Ireland, India, and the Black Atlantic.

Creative Practice
Faculty treat artistic practice as a form of knowledge and a site of resistance, identity formation, and cultural innovation. Their expertise includes contemporary American poetry and the Black literary and musical arts, along with visual and material art grounded in place-based African American Studies.

Science and Technology
Faculty examine how science, technology, and medicine shape the lives of people of African descent. Their work on artificial intelligence includes using AI to study and preserve African archives, developing decolonial African approaches to knowledge, and exploring copyright and AI in popular music, and how AI is changing our experience of art, sport, and culture. In the medical humanities, faculty draw on literature, art, religion, and bioethics to rethink ideas of healing, recovery, and wholeness.