The Program offers a Graduate Certificate in African and African American Studies. Students enrolled in doctoral programs at the University are eligible for enrollment as are students in the MALS Program (Master of Arts in Liberal Studies) . The curriculum includes course work, teaching and research. The award of a graduate certificate is carried on the student's official transcript upon completion of the program. Students enrolled in the graduate program are eligible to apply for AAAS teaching assistantships and research funds.
The Graduate Program is designed to provide access for students and scholars to a broad range of information and research from the humanities and social sciences, and the arts and professions, while taking advantage of the University's distinctive resources in each of these areas of study. Graduate students enrolled in the program are encouraged to participate in all African and African American Studies Program events, including the Program's lecture series and symposia. African & African American Studies at Duke has a specific interdisciplinary focus on Diaspora Studies and Gender Studies. This emphasis characterizes both our faculty's strength and the curriculum's critical interdisciplinary strategy. AAAS at Duke University is committed to a new model of Black Studies, one which sees race as inevitably intertwined with other social hierarchies and one which forces attention to continuities and disjunctures of social experience across the Diaspora.
We recognize that many of our graduates will spend a good part of their professional lives teaching about issues like race and gender that are emotionally charged, often so much so that students find it difficult to talk about them honestly. In the spring of 2003, the department initiated a new graduate seminar, Teaching Race, Teaching Gender, which focused on the problematics of teaching about social hierarchies. We expect to be able to offer the seminar in alternating years.