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

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Other major universities in the CIC (for example, Ohio State, Michigan State, and Michigan) and
around the country (Yale, Cornell, UCLA, Florida, and UPenn) have programs in African
Studies. None of them is, however, conceived explicitly as an intellectual partnership between a
major discipline and African Studies. Owing to its uniqueness, the proposed program provides
an academic niche, which will contribute to Penn State’s vision of becoming a leader in
multidisciplinary, international, and multicultural scholarship.
In summary, the proposed dual-title doctoral degree program will:
• provide a framework within which doctoral students can pursue an integrated suite of
regional/thematic courses to complement their specialization in their major discipline;
• use African Studies graduate faculty to enrich the multidisciplinary training and research
activities of Penn State doctoral students who have an interest in Africa;
• enhance the standing of Penn State in African Studies among CIC universities; and
• enhance the marketability of Penn State doctoral students by making it possible for them
to acquire a unique qualification, which can attract a wide range of employers in
academia, the US government, bilateral and multilateral international organizations and
international non-governmental organizations.
B. African Studies As a Field of Study and Research
African Studies is an interdisciplinary field of enquiry. It borrows from the paradigms of the
humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, to engage scholarship on the African condition
covering the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods.
African Studies experienced its birth as an academic discipline in the 1950s-1960s as the product
of two corresponding global dynamics: the independence movement in many African countries
and the civil rights movement in the US. During its formative period, the field was dominated by
the humanities and arts, especially history, literature, and languages. Early academic initiatives
focused on rewriting African history from an African perspective (for example, Ali Mazrui and
Basil Davidson); and on energizing African literature (for example, the African Writers Series by
the Heinemann Press, which published significant foundational works like Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Palm Wine Drunkard). As a number of newly-independent
African countries rejected the West and experimented with socialist and Marxist models, this
period also witnessed the growth of intellectual traditions in political economy. African
scholarship in these disciplines was undertaken in major universities in North America and
Europe and in the emerging universities on the continent itself. In addition to its being
recognized as an academic discipline, one of the concrete manifestations of the growth of
African Studies during the period was the founding of the African Studies Association of
America (ASA) in 1957, followed by the founding of the association’s journal, the African
Studies Review. The ASA has been an important focal point for the development of African
Studies in the US by bringing Africanist scholars and policy makers together in one forum to
tackle the main problems facing the continent and its peoples. The growth of the ASA is a
barometer of the simultaneous growth and maturity of African Studies. Today, the ASA has 325
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