Black Studies Minor

Housed in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) Department, the Black Studies minor offers students grounding in the intellectual histories, political movements, cultural expressions, and critical theories of the black diaspora, all while engaging a range of methodologies from across disciplines. Attention to the significance of social justice is a hallmark of the minor. Supported by faculty expertise in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and the Pacific, students can explore the globally multi-sited nature of black freedom struggles, both past and present, and examine blackness through a comparative lens.

Through careful advising, students can pursue a set of electives, tailored to their interests, enabling broad or deep exploration of specific histories, geographic regions, and thematic concerns.

Course Requirements

To graduate with a minor in Black studies, a student is required to complete six courses. With a foundation in CRES 68, Approaches to Black Studies is the expected foundational course. (Students may substitute it with CRES 10, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies: An Introduction), students will undertake an additional 25 credits—or five upper-division elective courses—drawn from the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences divisions. Students can select these five electives from a list of pre-approved courses, with no more than three from any one program or department. Courses not appearing on the approved list can be petitioned for credit.

Lower-Division Courses

One lower-division core course:

CRES 68

Approaches to Black Studies

Students may substitute CRES 10, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies: An Introduction, for the lower-division core course requirement.

Upper-Division Courses

Five upper-division courses, with no more than three from any one program or department:

Division of Humanities

CRES 113	Music and Performance	5
CRES 118	Abolitionist Futures	5
CRES 131	Black Freedom Movements	5
CRES 132	Black Speculations	5
CRES 181	The Lynch Doctrine: From Rough Justice to Stand Your Ground	5
CRES 188B	Topics in Black Studies	5
CRES 190C	The Black Transnational	5
FMST 102	Feminist Critical Race Studies	5
FMST 115	Gender, Sexuality, and Transnational Migration Across the Americas	5
FMST 117	Post Zora Interventions: Art, Activism and Anthropology	5
FMST 124	Technology, Science, and Race Across the Americas	5
FMST 125	Race, Sex, and Technology	5
FMST 145	Racial and Gender Formations in the U.S	5
HIS 109A	Race, Gender, and Power in the Antebellum South	5
HIS 110H	Greater Reconstruction: Race, Empire, and Citizenship in the Post-Civil War United States	5
HIS 120	W.E.B. Du Bois	5
HIS 121B	African American History: 1877 to the Present	5
HIS 122A	Jazz and United States Cultural History, 1900-1945	5
HIS 122B	Jazz and United States Cultural History, 1945 to the Present	5
HIS 137A	Africa to 1800	5
HIS 137B	Africa from 1800 to the Present	5
HIS 158C /ANTH 179	Slavery in the Atlantic World: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives	5
LIT 121N	RAGE: Race and Performance	5
LIT 135A	Topics in African Literature	5
LIT 154C	Hip Hop Hi Art	5
LIT 161A	African American Literature	5
LIT 161B	African American Women Writers	5
LIT 190O	Studies in Slavery, Race, and Nation in the Americas	5

Division of Social Sciences

ANTH 110Q /CRES 110Q/FMST 110Q	Queer Sexuality in Black Popular Culture	5
ANTH 130A	Anthropology of Africa.	5
ANTH 130F /CRES 130	Blackness In Motion: Anthology of the African Diasporas	5
ANTH 130L	Ethnographies of Latin America	5
ANTH 159	Race and Anthropology	5
ANTH 194L	Archaeology of the African Diaspora	5
ANTH 196J	Imagining America	5
EDUC 160	Issues in Educational Reform	5
EDUC 164	Urban Education	5
EDUC 181	Race, Class, and Culture in Education	5
LALS 150	Afro-Latinos/as: Social, Cultural, and Political Dimensions	5
LALS 171	Brazil in Black and White	5
SOCY 128I /LGST 128I	Race and Law	5
SOCY 143	Black Botanical Medicine in the Americas	5
SOCY 180	Social Movements of the 1960s	5

Division of Arts

ARTG 142 /CRES 142	Black Aesthetics: Interventions in Digital Media	5
FILM 165B	Race on Screen	5
HAVC 140C	Race and American Visual Arts	5
MUSC 180B	Studies in World Musics: Africa and the Americas	5
THEA 100B	Black Theater USA	5
THEA 100W	Black/African Diasporic World Theater	5
THEA 151A	Studies in Performance: African American Theater Arts Troupe	5
THEA 167	Africanist Aesthetics: Live Dialogues in the Americas and Africa	5