Professors told the News that change was made to reflect a growing interest in the study of Black people in regions beyond the United States — at Yale and in the broader field.
Brady Payne
Contributing Reporter
Kimberly Angeles, Contributing Photographer
The Yale department that studies people of African descent in the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America has changed its name to the Black Studies Department, after 55 years of being called the African American Studies Department.
Three professors in the department told the News that the change was made to reflect a growing number of new professors whose regions of study extend beyond the United States.
“We study the lives and histories and movements and creative expressions of Black people around the world wherever they are, not just in North America and not even just in the Americas,” department chair Erica Edwards said.
According to Edwards, the change emerged naturally through a yearslong process of evaluating the goals and direction of the department. This evaluation started in the 2022-23 academic year under the leadership of then-chair Phillip Atiba Solomon, formerly known as Phillip Atiba Goff.
Elleza Kelley, the director of undergraduate studies, wrote that the department changed its name to reflect a “commitment to the study of black life, history, and culture beyond the continental United States.”
She added that the department in recent years has “welcomed incredible new faculty members who work on Brazil and the Caribbean.”
The department welcomed Marlene Daut in 2022 and Kaiama Glover in 2023, both of whom teach courses cross-listed in the French department. Both have published books on Haiti. Nana Adusei-Poku, who studies artistic productions from the Black diaspora, joined in 2023, as well. Christen Smith, who studies anti-Black state violence in Brazil, also joined the department in 2024.
Glover said that though she “would have argued, and did argue, when the name was African American Studies, that the label could be applied to the Americas writ large,” the old name conjured in people’s imaginations something “fairly U.S.-centric.”
Glover further said that she has heard from students “good things so far, maybe with some weariness,” which she attributed to students’ wondering whether the new name is “concretizing something that’s already in process, and that’s commitment, or is the name an aspiration.”
Similar changes have occurred at Northwestern and Georgetown, schools which also renamed their African American studies departments to Black studies. Edwards said that the name more broadly “reflects where we are as a field.”
This name calls back to the history of Black studies at Yale. In 1968, the Black Student Alliance at Yale hosted a symposium titled “Black Studies in the University.” Following the conference, students and faculty petitioned for a major in Afro-American studies.
In the preface to the book “Black studies in the university; a symposium,” a compilation of what happened at the conference, scholar Armstead L. Robinson ’69 recognized “significant omissions; for instance, little attention is paid to the Caribbean or to Latin America.”
Edwards said that the department would be “convening a panel to commemorate that symposium on Oct. 27.”
Though the department name has officially changed, the Black Studies Department’s course code is still “AFAM.”
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