African Studies Track
Basic Requirements: 14 half-courses

1. Required Courses:
1. AAAS 20: Introduction to African Languages and Cultures (not restricted to concentrators). Indigenous languages serve as a road map to understanding how social, political, and economic institutions and processes develop: from kinship structures, the evolution of political offices, trade relations, to the transfer of environmental knowledge. African languages are key to apprehending how sub-Saharan Africans understand, organize, and transmit essential knowledge to successive generations.
2. Other survey course on African history.
3. Two half courses on Africa, one in the social sciences and one in the humanities. (These courses need not be given in the department.)
4. Six half-courses. These may include relevant courses from the Core and discipline-specific courses. In picking these six half-courses, students should declare a focus. Some students will declare a disciplinary focus or more general focus in the humanities or in social sciences; others, an area focus or thematic methodological or comparative focus (e.g., comparative literary or historical analysis, comparative economic and political development). These are not the only possibilities, but students are required to make a coherent case for the course of electives they choose.
5. Two terms of an African language. The language requirement is met by attaining a level of competence equivalent to two half-courses of African language study. Students who can show evidence at the beginning of their concentration that they have a level of competence equivalent to two half-courses of African language study will be required to substitute other courses offered in the department. Language courses taken outside of Harvard may be substituted upon approval by the Director of the Language Program and the undergraduate adviser.
2. Tutorials:
1. Sophomore Tutorial: AAAS 97a, a one-term course focusing on an African/African Diaspora topic.
2. Junior Tutorial: AAAS 98a, a one-term course that focuses on African studies topics to explore the contributions of African studies scholarship to individual disciplines and to explore the methodologies most useful for African studies research.