The African American and African Diaspora Studies Program is a vibrant program in the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender and Ethnic Studies, a unit of the College of Liberal Arts. Students may major or minor in African American and African Diaspora Studies.

The program is designed to provide students with the social, cultural, literary, and historical knowledge for a critical understanding of the effects of local and global anti-blackness and black people's response to it. The program is built around a core of courses that systematically document critical aspects of the Afro-American experience from its antecedents in antiquity to the prominent issues of the present day.

Engaging both past and contemporary aspects of this experience provides students access to materials and events that have historically not been given adequate treatment, and allows students to contextualize current issues relating to black people in an academically critical way. The program is also designed to effectively prepare students who desire to continue on to graduate work in Africana Studies.