About
Greetings from the Chair
The Department is truly multidisciplinary. Our faculty, like the mission of African and African American Studies itself, spans the social sciences and humanities. Thus, our courses reach from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, Sociology, and Psychology, to Art, Music, History, Language and Linguistics, Women, Sexuality and Gender studies as well as Literature and Philosophy. Our scope is, likewise, genuinely global. The department’s faculty reflect genuine depth of expertise not only in the U.S. and the African Continent but increasingly in the Afro-Latin American world and the Caribbean.
Department Chairs
2018-present
Tommie Shelby
Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy
2013-2018
Lawrence D. Bobo
Lawrence D. Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, becomes chair of the Department of African and African American Studies.
2006-2013
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, becomes the second woman to chair the department and the second black woman to be appointed a full professor with tenure in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is also the first African American with a tenured appointment in the Department of History.
1991-2006
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., accepts Harvard's appointment as W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and begins his tenure as chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.
1990-1991
Barbara Johnson
At the initiative of President Derek Bok and Henry Rosovsky, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Barbara Johnson, professor of English and American Language and Literature, is selected as interim chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies. Johnson leads the search for a new chair of Afro-American Studies and a new director of the Du Bois Institute.
1984-87 & 1988-90
Werner Sollors
Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies, serves as acting chair of the department.
1980-1989
Nathan Irving Huggins
Nathan Irving Huggins, professor of history at Columbia University, accepts Harvard's offer to become chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies. He also is named the first permanent director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research.
1976-1979
Eileen Southern
Eileen Southern, professor of Afro-American studies and music, becomes chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies. She is the first black woman to be appointed full professor with tenure at Harvard.
1969-1976
Ewart Guinier
Professor Ewart Guinier is named first chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies.