Doctor's degree in African American Studies at Harvard University

 

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Doctor's Degree in African American Studies at Harvard University

Harvard University
Doctor's degree
African American Studies

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-Degree Requirements-
The Department of African and African American Studies offers a graduate program in the field of African American studies. The aim of this program is to combine an interdisciplinary training in African American cultural and social studies with a focus in a major disciplinary field, leading to the Ph.D. in African American Studies. The program admits four or five students a year into a five- to six-year program.

While there are no specific prerequisites, typically students either have undergraduate majors in African American studies, or have majors in fields such as anthropology, comparative literature, English, history, history of art, music, philosophy, sociology, and religious studies, and have done some undergraduate work in the field of African American studies.

The fundamental rationale for the program is that there now exists a substantial body of scholarly writing on African American social, cultural, economic and political life and history, conducted by scholars with a primary training in a traditional discipline, who have drawn on the work of colleagues in other fields to enrich their work. This interdisciplinary corpus of scholarship is at the core of African American studies, and most serious work on African American literature, history, culture and social, economic or political life, proceeds with an awareness of this interdisciplinary background. There is, as a result, a fairly substantial tradition of writings and a lexicon of ideas that together define a core of knowledge in the field. Familiarity with this core at the graduate level is an important part of the training of those who work on these topics.

Along with this background, there is also a good deal of work on the concept of race, which is clearly central to the definition of the intellectual shape of the field, and that can no longer be said to be rooted in a single primary discipline. It draws on anthropology, sociology and intellectual history, the history of science and philosophy, literary and cultural studies, and political science.

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