Emory Establishes

PhD Program in African American Studies

African American studies faculty at Emory University are energized as they begin the rollout of a new PhD program that will be the first in the Southeast United States.

“Our faculty have invested years of strategic planning, imagination, and bold ambition to develop the curriculum and recruit top scholar-teachers working across the humanities and social sciences in this vibrant interdisciplinary field,” says Carla Freeman, interim dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences.

The new program had no trouble ge ing the word out; an announcement on social media earlier this fall received some twnety-thousand shares. The program is currently taking applications, with the first doctoral students set to enroll in fall 2023.

African American studies has a long history at Emory, which established the first undergraduate major in the interdisciplinary field in 1971, making it the first degree-granting African American studies program in the South.

“The PhD program in African American studies is something that we have worked so hard for and is so necessary, given the situation where we are right now in terms of understanding the inequities in America, how we got here, and how we get out,” says historian Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies.

“Having that critical mass [of faculty] and knowing we could be the first PhD program in the Southeast, we realized we had an opportunity to create something unique,” says Walter Rucker, professor of African American studies and history, and chair of the faculty commi ee that shepherded the program from proposal to implementation.

With fourteen core faculty and forty more affiliated faculty throughout the university, “Emory will have the largest graduate faculty of any African American studies PhD program in the nation,” says Rucker, adding that the program “is a unique and unrivaled configuration that will provide a rich intellectual space and training for doctoral students. . . . The size, interdisciplinary breadth and depth of that talented pool of faculty cannot be overstated.”—Elaine Justice