Students electing this program through participating departments will earn a degree with a dual-title at the Ph.D. level, i.e., Ph.D. in (graduate program name) and African American and Diaspora Studies.
The following graduate programs offer a dual-title Ph.D. degree in African American and Diaspora Studies: Art Education, Communication Arts and Sciences, English, History, Philosophy.
The primary objective of the dual-title degree program in African American Studies is to expand teaching, research, and scholarship on the nearly one billion people of African descent scattered across several regions of the world. As a program committed to integrating knowledge produced across disciplines and to crediting the importance of historical considerations, it will reinforce and broaden the knowledge that students acquire and that scholars typically cultivate in the traditional disciplines. This is accomplished through partnerships with allied disciplines, such as History, Political Science, Philosophy, English, Comparative Literature, and Art Education. Graduate students are trained to describe, analyze, and evaluate the practices, phenomena, and policies that both issue from and structure the experiences and possibilities of African-descended peoples in the Americas and in African diasporic populations around the world. Students in more traditional disciplines such as English or History who want to acquire formal knowledge about African Americans and the African Diaspora beyond what is offered by their home departments will be able to acquire that knowledge through the seminars offered in this program. The program aims to produce Penn State doctoral graduates with a competitive advantage for African American and Diaspora Studies-related employment in academia and elsewhere.