Building Black Futures Through
Black Study

About the Department of Black Study

Through trans/anti-disciplinary programming, community engagement, and curriculum, Black Study centers Black ways of knowing and being in this and other imagined worlds as they articulate through

1. Black Radical Traditions with an emphasis on Black Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies and Perspectives;

2. Black inventions, interventions, futurities, and abolition;

3. Africa and its Black Diasporas.

Spotlighted: Event

November 21
Culver Arts Center, 3834 Main St
Riverside, 92501
+ Google Map

Spotlighted: Uplift

  • Public Statement to Protect Campus Speech and Academic Freedom

    We publicly condemn the UC leadership’s adoption of policies that criminalize our right to teach, write, and research the truth about Palestine. We publicly condemn directives that limit our rights to free speech and expression on behalf of Palestinian liberation with threats of censure or retaliation. 

    Learn More

Bold Visioning in Liberatory Praxis

The Department of Black Study emphasizes the verb “study” and stresses the engaged and embodied practice of teaching and research that is simultaneously diasporic, local, communal, planetary, historical, contemporary, and future-oriented. It is, therefore, necessarily transdisciplinary in scope, straddling various disciplines in the Social Sciences, Humanities, STEM, and the Arts. Black Study’s trans-disciplinarity is anchored in an intersectional lens, maintaining both symmetry and dissonance to seriously engage Black epistemologies, Black metaphysics, Black temporality, Black resistance, and Black social, cultural, creative, and spiritual life. 

Our Program

Explore the Department of Black Study Curriculum

The B.A. degree consists of 56 units with requirements focused on the major social factors and movements impacting Black peoples in the African continent and its diasporas, as well as courses along the following themes: