The Department

W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies
325 New Africa House, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003-6210
Degrees: Bachelor of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy

Chair of Department: Professor Amilcar Shabazz
Graduate Program Director: Professor Robert Paul Wolff
Head Secretary: Tricia Loveland

Phone: [413] 545.2751
Fax: [413] 545.0628

(Photo by Ed Cohen)

If you would like us to contact you or if you would like further information about our programs, please click on the following e-mail address: tlovelan@afroam.umass.edu.

For information on how to obtain an application form for our graduate program, please click on the following: Applying to the Program.

The Field

The W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies is one of the largest such departments in the country, offering an undergraduate major for all students who wish in-depth knowledge of the history and culture of Black people in Africa and the New World. The course of study is interdisciplinary with courses in African and Afro-American history, art, political science, and literature. Students in our Department have the opportunity to participate in a variety of on- and off-campus learning situations. The training and experience of the faculty provides a perspective on the history, culture, and place in the world of Africans and Afro-Americans that differs markedly from that of the traditional disciplines. This approach to the study of humanity offers a better understanding of the totality of human experience. Our highly selective doctoral program seeks to reproduce both the scholarship and the social commitment of Du Bois in a new generation of scholars who will carry into the twenty-first century the work that Du Bois accomplished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rigorously trained by us in the highest ideals and most advanced techniques of scholarship, our students are urged to carry that scholarship out of the academy and into the world, for the good of the community and the nation. We endeavor to produce well-trained scholars who will bring a unique fusion of cross-disciplinary scholarship and social commitment to their own colleges and universities, and to the communities in which they live.