About
The Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora (RCD) offers seven possible areas of concentration: Africana Studies, American Studies, Asian American Studies; Colonialism Studies; Latinx Studies; Native American and Indigenous Studies; and Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies. Our programs engage the critical, comparative, and interdisciplinary analysis of societies and cultures in the United States and around the world. The RCD department offers rigorous, scholarly curricula for the study of race, colonialism, transnational migration, and struggles for social justice and cultural sovereignty, with attention to class and other kinds of social difference and hierarchy.
The department furnishes students with the necessary tools to interrogate contemporary and historical social inequalities. And beyond the classroom, RCD studies prepare students to negotiate their place as leaders in continually changing local and global communities.
The RCD's programs are interlocking in nature, combining topics and methods drawn from the humanities and social sciences and foregrounding analytical, thematic, theoretical, and political affiliations. Students majoring in the department develop depth in one of three areas of concentration (Africana Studies, American Studies, or Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies) while gaining a comparative understanding of the vast inter-regional constellation of studies in race, colonialism, and diaspora. Students can also minor in Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Colonialism Studies, Latinx Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies. Our curricula enable students to connect studies of race, ethnicity, colonialism, empire, and migration in the United States to studies of colonial processes around the world.
RCD studies are guided by the fundamental intellectual mandate of social justice, providing a curricular home for engaged scholarship addressing the most urgent, historically-rooted, social questions of our time.
The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, and the African American Trail Project remain committed to the pursuit of racial justice and equality at this moment of global pandemic. Read our statement.
