BY BOB C. SULLIVAN

For more than a half-century, African and African American studies have been part of the curriculum options offered by Stanford University, in California, one of the United States’s finest universities. That is soon changing for the better, as the university’s Board of Trustees recently approved the creation of a department of African and African American studies that will open in January 2024.

The decision is the result of the Black Lives Movement that sparked the nation-wide protests against police brutality targeting Black people in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer in 2020.

Dr. R. Lanier Anderson, the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Stanford, said, “Events since 2020 have made it increasingly apparent that the time has come for Stanford to put our work in AAAS on a permanent footing.”

A task force recommended the departmentalization of the program in 2021, with Ato Quayson, a professor of English and interdisciplinary studies, as the department’s inaugural chair.

In addition to courses associated with Black studies, the department will collaborate with the Institute for Diversity of the Arts to also give students in the department the opportunity to be also dive into creative arts.