Welcome

Welcome to the Department of African American Studies at Yale. The African American Studies Department examines, from numerous disciplinary perspectives, the experiences of people of African descent in Black Atlantic societies, including the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

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From the Collection

  • The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shown here with former Yale trustee the Rev. Gardiner M. Day, received an honorary LL.D degree at Yale’s 263rd commencement in 1964.

  • Ella Fitzgerald in 1940, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, who documented much of the Harlem Renaissance.Credit...Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust

  • Walter Evans Collection of Frederick Douglass and Douglass Family Papers

  • Half length group portrait, family group of six; father, mother, four children

News

March 30, 2023
Dr. Elijah Anderson, Yale’s Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies and winner of the 2021 Stockholm Prize for Criminology, was recently interviewed...
March 28, 2023
Crystal Feimster stood alongside her family as she spoke to the Pierson community for the first time on Tuesday night as their next Head of College. read more
February 3, 2023
Atlanta Journal Constitution honoring the late colleague historian John Blassingame with Gerald D. Jaynes, A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics, and African American...

 Whitfield Lovell, American, Ode 1999

Engage with Our Ideas

“Fear of a Black-Studies Planet There’s a reason Ron DeSantis feel threatened by African American Studies,” Roderick A. Ferguson The Chronicle of Higher Education

“In their place; the heavy burden of being Black in a white spac,” Elijah Anderson the guardian.com

“Black , Bold and Queer: Celebrating the Legacy of Marlon Riggs,” Thomas Allen Harris Documentary

“Style With Soul: How The World’s Most Iconic Black Women Singers Expressed Themselves Through Fashion,” Tavia Nyong’o Vogue

“White Supermacy as Daily Pratice,” Micah Jones, Historians’ Watch

“José Muñoz, Then and There: On the afterlives of the pioneering queer theorist,” Tavia Nyong’o, thebaffler.com

Bisa Butler Quilt Kindred