Life as an AAAS Graduate Student

The Graduate Program of the Department of African and African American Studies was established with the help of many colleagues in the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  The design of the program takes advantage of our intellectual resources, working within the framework of Harvard's traditions, in order to provide a graduate education that trains colleagues so that they may continue with the work of the field in the years to come.  At the heart of our program is one idea and one practice.

The idea is that we are an interdisciplinary field, a meeting place of scholars and methods grounded in different disciplinary traditions. We aim to educate students who know their way around this interdisciplinary field while at the same time learning the skills, methods, and problems of a discipline. So each of our students will be able to go out into the world ready to teach and research African and African American issues within a discipline but also will be able to introduce their students to the whole interdisciplinary field and to make scholarly contributions to it.

The practice is one of teaching together: your first year as a student here you will participate in an interdisciplinary seminar talk by all of our faculty. We enjoy this practice because it allows us to get to know each other and to know you. But it is also an embodiment of the idea of an interdisciplinary conversation that allows each of us, whatever his or her training, to see how insights from other intellectual traditions can give fruit in our own understanding and, more specifically, in our work.