1 GRADUATE COUNCIL MEETING 9 May 2012 102 Kern Graduate ...

J5
market for manufactured goods from northern countries and an attractive destination for foreign
direct investment from all over the world. These fundamental structural attributes have made
twenty-first century Africa an important arena over which the European Union, the US, China
and other developed and newly-developing countries and regions vie for access to economic
opportunities and political influence.
Africa has also long played a role in trans-Atlantic cultural exchange. Recently more scholarship
has attended to the prominence of African forms of storytelling, music, and other cultural forms
in global cultural exchange. In the field of Comparative Literature the role of Africa has gained
greater and greater attention as a major player in global cultural interactions. The Comparative
Literature program at Penn State has long been considered one of the few that included attention
to literary works from Africa long before it was fashionable to do so. Adding this dual-title
would allow us to highlight the existing faculty and students that work on Comparative
Literature and Africa and it would complement our current dual title with Asian Studies.
Graduate students from Penn State’s multiplicity of academic and sociocultural backgrounds
who wish to study Africa’s role in the present global system, must be provided with an
intellectual ‘home’ to do so. The proposed dual-title doctoral degree program will provide this
opportunity by making it possible for interested Comparative Literature doctoral students to
obtain an African Studies specialization to complement their degree in the primary discipline.
The proposed program will provide such students with a framework within which they can
integrate their Africa-related courses in Comparative Literature and other disciplines on campus,
in a systematic way to engage in comparative, mulitdisciplinary, African Studies.
The multidisciplinary approach of the proposed program will utilize the expertise of existing
Africanists at Penn State to design courses, which will adopt the lens of the humanities, social
sciences, education, biobehavioral sciences, and environmental sciences, as necessary and
applicable. For example, analyses of a particular genre of African literary thought will benefit
from exposure to a range of disciplinary approaches to the study of African culture, politics,
history, gender dynamics, and the environment. While students in Comparative Literature have
often worked on cross-disciplinary projects of this nature before, having the institutional support
of a dual-degree will strengthen the quality of their work and help them highlight their training
on the job market.
The integrative orientation of the proposed program builds on its multidisciplinarity and is
further embedded in two components: a pedagogy that assists doctoral students to synthesize
their thematic and/or regional interests in African Studies; and an overall structure that allows
doctoral students to combine their interests in Comparative Literature with African Studies into a
single intellectual endeavor. No other avenue currently exists at Penn State for doctoral students
to pursue this intellectual convergence between their major Comparative Literature and African
Studies.