The Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora (RCD) is home to seven curricular tracks.
Our tracks engage the critical, comparative, and interdisciplinary analysis of societies and cultures in the United States and around the world. The RCD Department offers rigorous, scholarly curricula for the study of race, colonialism, transnational migration, and struggles for social justice and cultural sovereignty, with attention to class and other kinds of social difference and hierarchy.
The department furnishes students with the necessary tools to interrogate contemporary and historical social inequalities. And beyond the classroom, RCD studies prepare students to negotiate their place as leaders in continually changing local and global communities.
The RCD's seven tracks are interlocking in nature, combining topics and methods drawn from the humanities and social sciences and foregrounding analytical, thematic, theoretical, and political affiliations. Students develop depth in their particular major (Africana Studies, American Studies, or Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies) or minor course (Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, Latinx Studies, Colonialism Studies, or Native American and Indigenous Studies), while gaining a comparative understanding of the vast inter-regional constellation of studies in race, colonialism, and diaspora. Our curricula enable students to connect studies of race, ethnicity, colonialism, empire, and migration in the United States to studies of colonial processes around the world.
RCD studies are guided by the fundamental intellectual mandate of social justice, providing a curricular home for engaged scholarship addressing the most urgent, historically-rooted, social questions of our time.