The Curriculum in African and Afro-American Studies was established in 1969 amidst a historical shift of higher education institutions towards defining and embracing more inclusive academic and societal missions. At UNC-CH, student activists – mostly members of the UNC-CH Black Student Movement – demanded an education that reflected awareness of and sensitivity to the cultural, intellectual, and historical legacies and contributions of people of African descent. With the establishment of African/African American Studies programs at UNC-CH and other institutions, this specific field of study emerged to address and understand societal structures, formations, and realities produced by both inequality and social change experienced primarily by people of Africa and people of African descent in the United States. A formal Department of African and Afro-American Studies was established at UNC-CH in 1997.

Over time, the fields of African American Studies and African Studies have nurtured and interfaced with expansive, diasporic conceptions of African/Black identity and community, traversing geographies and time to embrace a truly global understanding of the histories, cultures, and knowledge systems of African-descended peoples. These new diasporic paradigms charted the lifeworlds of the African diasporas in Latin America, Europe, the Indian Ocean littoral, East Asia and others. To mirror this expansion of grander conceptions of diaspora and imperative to comprehend Black experiences in a globalized context within the field, the unit at UNC-CH renamed itself the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies in 2013.

While the name of the department has changed over the past decade, the core mission and objectives of the program have remained largely consistent over its half century of existence. In essence, the unit continues to be dedicated to the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the lives and experiences of people of African descent all over the world. Its interdisciplinary roots and subject-area configuration bring together anthropologists, historians, political scientists, literary scholars, linguists, religious studies experts, and others to produce a wide spectrum of erudition and methodological approaches that enrich both the student experience at UNC-CH and the field’s intellectual discourse.