Ethnic and Diasporic Studies

Ethnic Studies as an academic discipline lies at the intersection of several increasingly powerful developments in American thought and culture. First, interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship has become so prevalent as to represent a dominant intellectual norm. Second, the use of this new scholarly methodology to meet new academic needs and illuminate new subject matter has given rise to a plethora of discourses—women’s studies; Native American studies; African American studies; gay, lesbian, and transgender studies; and global studies. Third, and perhaps most important, there has been a growing recognition, both inside and outside academia, that American reality is incorrigibly and irremediably plural and that responsible research and pedagogy must account for and accommodate this fact.

We define Ethnic Studies, loosely, as the study of the dynamics of racial and ethnic groups (also loosely conceived) who have been denied, at one time or another, full participation, and the full benefits of citizenship, in American society. We see these dynamics as fascinating in themselves, but we also feel that studying them illuminates the entire spectrum of humanistic inquiry and that a fruitful cross-fertilization will obtain between Ethnic Studies and the College’s well-established curricula in the humanities, the arts, the sciences, and the social sciences.