College of the Liberal Arts Creates Department of Africana Studies
A proposal to reunite the Department of African American Studies and the African Studies Program in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts into a single academic unit — the Department of Africana Studies — has been approved by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost after receiving the endorsement of University Faculty Senate and faculty in the respective units. Penn’s State Board of Trustees also was informed of the reunification during its May 7-8 meeting.
“This is a pivotal next step for Penn State and our college to take to strengthen the interdisciplinary study of Africa and people of African descent as a critical component of a liberal arts education,” said Clarence Lang, Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts. “The reunification heightens our ability to solidify the academic and scholarly interconnections between African and African American Studies and build on the complexities that a unified field can advance. It also aligns our approach with those taken being taken by our counterparts in the Big Ten and elsewhere and better positions us as leaders in the field in terms of student success and faculty productivity.”