These course listings are subject to change. Courses with low enrollment may be canceled. The official system of record at the University of Virginia is the Student Information System (SIS). www.virginia.edu/sis. Make sure to discuss your curricular plan and academic progress report with your AAS major advisor.

AAS Courses

1000 Level

AAS 1020: Introduction to African American Studies

This introductory course builds upon the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean surveyed in AAS 1010. Drawing on disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Political Science and Sociology, the course focuses on the period from the late 19th century to the present and is comparative in perspective. It examines the links and disjunctions between communities of African descent in the United States and in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The course begins with an overview of AAS, its history, assumptions, boundaries, and topics of inquiry, and then proceeds to focus on a number of inter-related themes: patterns of cultural experience; community formation; comparative racial classification; language and society; family and kinship; religion; social and political movements; arts and aesthetics; and archaeology of the African Diaspora.

2000 Level

AAS 2500: Topic Courses in Africana Studies

• Racial Passing in Lit & Culture: Do you know Blackness when you see it? Does it have a sound? Can Blackness be learned? This interdisciplinary course serves as an introduction to African American literature refusing to take its own Blackness for granted. The texts we will read and watch revolve around the theme of racial passing. Looking at the African American literary canon through this lens allows us to trouble what we think we know about authenticity and Black identity.

• Black Hope, Black Despair: Inspired by the critical and popular success of Ryan Coogler’s film, Sinners, this interdisciplinary course explores representations of the Black South in 20th and 21st century literature, film, music, and television. Through close readings of various kinds of texts, we will investigate how the Black South has been imagined, mythologized, contested, and redefined in the American popular imagination. 

• Race & Place in African American Life: This introductory course examines how place and spatial mobility have mattered for the ways African Americans have defined their lives and experienced race in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will study historical and present-day processes that produced Black people’s inequitable social and economic experiences of places as well as the pleasures and affinities Black people find in places they inhabit.  We also will examine how African Americans move between places, including their movement within metropolitan areas or between U.S. regions. 

• The Souls of Black Folk: In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. Some of the historical context for issues we will study come from the foundational work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We will discuss African Americans’ experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans will face in the future.

• African Americans in Pop Culture: Which mediated performances of Blackness do we find acceptable, and which do we scorn? How have Black Americans worked to assert their value in a culture marked by respectability politics? We will examine how the media has worked to inform “respectable,” exceptional Black self-presentation versus the deficient. Topics include: respectability politics, racial uplift, Afrofuturism, ’New Black,’ fashion, stand-up comedy, love, and rap battles.

3000 Level

AAS 3113: Horror Noire: A History of Black Americans in Horror

The horror genre provides daring, unflinching lessons. It is a syllabus of our social, political, and racial world. Black horror, in particular, has established itself as a primer on the quest for social justice. What can such a boundary-pushing genre teach us about paths to solidarity and democracy? What can we learn about disrupting racism, misogyny, and anti-Blackness?

AAS 3157: Caribbean Perspectives

Breaking with popular constructions of the region as a timeless tropical paradise, this course will re-define the Caribbean as the birthplace of modern forms of capitalism, globalization, and trans-nationalism. We will survey the founding moments of Caribbean history, including the imposition of slavery, the rise of plantation economies, and the development of global networks of goods and peoples.

AAS 3160: African Americans in Sport

This course provides a historical and analytical understanding of the issues involving race, racism, race relations in American sport. This course provides an overview of the sporting events, activism, icons, and time periods that have been shaped by America's continued struggle to improve race relations. 

• Black South in Pop Imagination: Inspired by the critical and popular success of Ryan Coogler’s film, Sinners, this interdisciplinary course explores representations of the Black South in 20th and 21st century literature, film, music, and television. Through close readings of various kinds of texts, we will investigate how the Black South has been imagined, mythologized, contested, and redefined in the American popular imagination. 

• Race, Ethnicity & Health in US: This course examines the relationships between race/ethnicity and health in the U.S. We will analyze the differential distribution of health between and within racial/ethnic groups and discuss the fundamental causes. We will question the reliance on interventions, such as behavior change and healthcare, that are insufficient for addressing these causes and identify alternative solutions while also considering barriers to their adoption. 

• Intro to Black Queer Film:
• Race, Class, Politics, & Environment: This course explores how race, class, and political power shape environmental policy and exposure to risk across neighborhoods and populations. Students analyze decision-making processes, interpret data, and evaluate stakeholder responses to environmental inequality. Emphasis is placed on critical analysis, data literacy, and collaborative learning. No prior experience required.

• Global Environmental Justice: Why do environmental problems look different around the world—and why do some people within and across countries experience them more than others? This course explores global struggles for environmental justice, from oil spills to land grabs, climate crises to water rights. Using an interdisciplinary lens, we’ll unpack how power, culture, and inequality shape what counts as “the environment” and what justice really means and requires—region by region, story by story.

• Africulture: Roots of US Agriculture: Led by a practicing farmer-activist, Michael Carter, Jr. of Carter Farms in nearby Orange County, Virginia, we will examine how principles, practices, plants and people of African descent have shaped US agriculture, and thus, the lives of all Americans. By examining a wide range of history, laws, attitudes, cultures and traditions, we will see how many US staple commodities and practices have their roots in Africa and observe cultural similarities between indigenous cultures around the world. While evaluating realities of today’s Black farmers and the innovations they devise to survive in a system stacked against them, we will look for solutions to an array of challenges faced by today's Black farmers in the US food system and across a wide range of environmental and agricultural arenas.

• Race & Medicine in America: This course examines medical practices that have shaped the social construction of race and reinforced healthcare inequalities over the last 60 years. We will discuss the role of medicine in racial meaning-making by examining the (mis)use of race in clinical decision-making and biomedical research and by interrogating the contrasting schemas of medicalization and criminalization that have informed/animated the racialization of health and illness.

• Black Power & Environmental Movements: The 1960s in the US saw the popular rise of both Black Power and the modern environmental movement. Despite conceptual and tactical resonances, and Black communities’ disproportionate experience of environmental harm, these movements became seen as almost antithetical to each other. However, by studying them together we illuminate exciting dimensions of both movements and their visions of survival. We will uncover how colonial conceptions of “nature” came to racially underpin modern environmentalism and explore how Black communities in the US and around the world have imaginatively and practically forged alternatives. Along the way, we may question and transform what we think of as “the environment” and Blackness.
   
• Black&Trans Others Gothic LitFilm: This course will explore the figure of the Gothic Other through the lens of Black Studies, Trans Studies, Disability Studies, and decolonial theory, reading authors such as Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Herbert G. de Lisser, and more. Through engaging a consortium of literary texts, filmic, performance art and critical essays, we will consider how bodies are imagined, constructed, and deconstructed at the site of the Other in the Gothic.
   
• Black Women, Slavery & Freedom: "This course has several objectives, the most important of which is to introduce students to the growing field of Black women’s history. Beginning in the early 1980s, a small cohort of mostly Black women scholars dug the trenches for the historiography of Black women’s lives, labors, and loves. Since then, scholarship has expanded each generation, and we will explore these contributions over space, place, and time. This is a syllabus that focuses on slavery and freedom, the North and the South (including the Caribbean), and the city, farm, and docks. You will read canonical texts from the 1980s and award-winning monographs (single-author books) published within the last decade. In this course, we will read Black women’s history written by Black women historians." 
   
• Education and Conflict: This course explores the complex historical, ideological, and political relationships between education and conflict in various African contexts. Beginning with indigenous conceptions of knowledge and education, it traces the impact of colonialism, independence movements, and contemporary challenges such as structural adjustment programs and generative AI on African education systems. Through case studies from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal/Mali, Kenya, and South Africa, students will learn to critically interrogate the evolving role of education (including their own) in different forms of conflict across the continent and around the world. 
   
• Tracing Your Genealogy: In this weekly course, students will learn qualitative research skills through spending  the semester conducting an in-depth research intensive exploration of their ancestry, heritage and identity. Rigorous qualitative research will include conducting family interviews, exploring genealogical records and tracing their history through the archives. 

4000 Level

AAS 4570: Advanced Research Seminar in African-American & African Studies

• Race, Power, and the Production of Knowledge: In this course, we will examine the social construction of knowledge about racial inequalities by interrogating conceptual, methodological, and discursive practices in research on Black people that compares them to others. We will uncover how these practices reinforce power-knowledge relations, embed epistemic violence into inquiry, and enable Black suffering to be commodified. We will also identify opportunities for decolonizing this research. 

• Black Feminist Theory: This course provides an advanced orientation to Black feminist scholarship through Black feminism’s existential questions: What is Black feminism? What and who are Black women? Who are Black feminism’s proper subjects or objects? What are the challenges to Black feminism? What kinds of creativity are fostered in a Black feminist framework? We will explore theoretical, literary, and artistic Black feminist work primarily from the United States.

Courses in other Departments

American Studies: 

• AMST 2500: Commodify Race/Gender/Sexuality (David Coyoca)
• AMST 3428: Race, Gender, Music (Fiona Ngo)

English Literature

• ENGL 2572: Black Writers in America (Lisa Woolfork)
• ENGL 2599: Landscapes of Black Education (K. Ian Grandison)
• ENGL 4570: W.E.B Du Bois (Marlon Ross)
• ENGL 4580: Race in American Places (K. Ian Grandison)

History - African History

• HIAF 1559: Debating African History (James La Fleur)
• HIAF 3051: West African History (James La Fleur)
• HIAF 3501: Gender, Law, and Empire (Emily Burrill)
• HIAF 4260: Disease, Medicine, and Health in African History (James La Fleur) 

History - United States History 

• HIUS 2053: American Slavery (Justene Hill Edwards)
• HIUS 3501: Race, Place, and the Schoolhouse (Erica Sterling)
• HIUS 4051: Slavery, Freedom, and Founders (Christa Dierksheide)
• HIUS 4051: Race, Nation, and Gender (Chloe Porche)

Media Studies

• MDST 2727: African Americans in Popular Culture (Robin Means Coleman)
• MDST 3113: Horror Noire: History of Black Americans in Horror (Robin Means Coleman)
• MDST 3760: Reading Black Digital Culture (Asleigh Wade)

Sociology

• SOC 3410: Race and Ethnic Relations (Milton Vickerman)
• SOC 4100: Black Community Life (B. Foster)
• SOC 4560: Race and Racism in Science (Natalie Aviles)

Women, Gender, and Sexuality

• WGS 3150: Race & Power in Gender & Sexuality (Taylor Nichols)