Africana Studies Mount Holyoke College

As a field of inquiry, Africana studies describes and analyzes the origins and experiences of people of African descent wherever they live or have lived. The intellectual traditions inform this field of African American, African, and African Diasporic studies. While it has a renewed focus on the connections and movements of African-descended people from different sites of Africa and the diaspora, it also values in-depth study of black people in discrete local, regional and national contexts. This field is inherently comparative, international, and interdisciplinary in approach, embracing the range of fields in the humanities and social sciences and including the performing arts.

The major prepares students for several careers: government, politics, international affairs, law, education, journalism, public health, religious studies, literature and the arts, and business management, to name only a few.