CFAS Summer Institute for Pre-First Years is scheduled for
Saturday, July 12 – Saturday, July 19, 2025
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The Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute is one of Penn’s premier Pre-First Year Student programs. This intensive one-week course of study is taught by standing Penn faculty and exposes students to major intellectual and cultural themes and currents in 19th, 20th, and 21st century African and African Diaspora studies.
The Institute is free of charge and includes room, board, books, and course tuition. Students who successfully complete the program's requirements earn 0.5c.u., graded pass/fail. All incoming pre-first year students interested in African, African American, and other African Diaspora studies are eligible to apply for admission to the Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute. The location of the 2025 program will be on campus.
The Summer Institute provides a rigorous introduction to the academic and co-curricular life at the University. Graduate Fellows assist students with course work and provide general mentoring. Participating students have access to a network of faculty, graduate students and fellow undergraduate students who support them throughout their Penn careers. Additionally, students who participate in the Institute enhance the leadership skills essential to their success at Penn and beyond. The Institute is free of charge and includes room, board, books, and course tuition (does not include travel).
Who Is Eligible?
All incoming first-year students interested in African, African American and other African diaspora studies are eligible to apply for admission to the Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute.
Applications are processed on a rolling admissions basis. Students are encouraged to apply early to secure admission into the 2025 Africana Studies Summer Institute cohort. Space is very limited.
2025 Courses Overview
Morning Session (select one)
Introduction to the Modern History of Africa - Professor Cheikh Babou
This course is designed as a brief and broad introduction to Africa’s modern history from the end of the Atlantic slave trade to the early years of self-rule. We will look in greater depth at key turning points in the history of Africa, including the “Scramble for Africa” and Africans’ responses to it, colonial rule, and the rise of nationalist and pan-Africanist movements.
Problems in the Interpretation of Black Cultural Production - Professor Herman Beavers
Black cultural production surrounds us, impacting us through a variety of mediums ranging across visual, sonic, and sensory registers. These artifacts invite us to interpret their significance, whether it take the form of the information we require to navigate everyday life, to be entertained, or to seek edification. This course will not involve large amounts of reading, rather, each class meeting will focus attention on a small corpus of cultural artifacts. Our collective goal will be the creation an inclusive and volatile interpretive practice emphasizing acts of close reading and listening, nuanced forms of visual interpretation, often in combination. Authors, artists, and musicians to be studied will include (but not be limited to) Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Spike Lee, Billie Holliday, Kara Walker, Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks, Chris Rock, Stevie Wonder, Toni Morrison, Carrie Mae Weems, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Frederick Douglass. Students will also be invited to propose cultural artifacts to be included as part of our interpretive practice.
Race, Cities, and the Built Environment - Professor Akira Rodriguez
Throughout history, cities have served as important sites of economy, politics, and culture. As spaces of economic and political opportunity, they attract a diverse population with shared and competing needs and interests. While urban planners and policymakers have a codified role in constructing and governing cities to meet these needs and interests, residents also have an important role in either supporting or resisting them. As cities are made and re-made, the built environment (buildings, streets, green and open spaces) reflects these struggles and interests. From slum clearance to redlining to urban renewal to gentrification, the transformation of the city’s-built environment are expressions of the struggles around cultural norms, economic priorities, and political capacity and opportunity. Quite often, these struggles are racialized, classed, and gendered in ways that conscribes nonwhite women of low-wealth into the least (economically and politically) valuable areas of the city. Without access to economic and political capital, residents in these areas tend to have lower life expectancy, fewer employment options, poorer school quality, greater risk of exposure to environmental hazards, and other dimensions of social vulnerability. There is an interdependent relationship between race and racialization, city making and governance, and the quality and condition of the built environment.
In this course, we will read about how different aspects of the built environment (land, housing, schools, transportation, and parks) transformed over the 20th century in US cities, and what were the role of race and racial difference in these shifts.
Afternoon Session (select one)
Transnational Black Social Movements - Professor Michael Hanchard
One of the recurrent features of transnational black social movements are their tendency to confront, circumvent and elide the power, authority and legitimacy of modern states, particularly when states neglect and/or deny the civil and human rights of black citizens/subjects who inhabit their territory.
The Movement 4 Black Lives, the anti-apartheid movement, reparations and the civil rights movements of the US, Brazil and Britain, exemplify the transnational circuitry of black freedom struggles. Black social movements have deployed ideas of freedom, sovereignty, nationhood as well as many modern Western political ideologies (Marxism, Liberalism, republicanism, feminism) without being subsumed by them. Students will learn how to situate and assess transnational black politics in relation to other transnational social movements—feminism and LGBTQ rights, labor and environmentalism.
Black Performance Studies - Professor Jasmine Johnson
In his 1995 documentary Black Is, Black Ain’t, Marlon Riggs traces a black cultural tradition while simultaneously destabilizing the very notion of blackness itself. He testifies that: “Black is black, and black is blue. Black is bright. Black is you. Black can do you in.” In Riggs’ configuration, black is a color, black is a feeling, black is a sound, black is materiality, and black is a life sentence. In an effort to raise critical questions around blackness, performance, race, and feeling, this course follows in the tradition of Riggs’ work.
In other words, this Summer Institute course examines the notion of blackness through theorizations of performance. It pursues the following questions: What is blackness? How is blackness embodied, felt, heard, represented, and made true through performance? How is Black performance political? Discussions and written work will interrogate the slipperiness of, desire for, and policing of blackness in order to trouble conceptions of race as a biological essence. In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the politics of Black creative labor and the processes of racialization produced through Black aesthetics.
Black Style: Fashions, Fictions, and Films of the 1920s - Professor Zita Nunes
The 1920s Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was driven by the belief that black people must be the ones to represent black people in literature, art, and politics. There was, however, no consensus about what these representations should look like or whether they should please white or black audiences—and there was certainly no consensus about what it meant to be black or to have black style. Using fashion as a lens, we will examine the lively debates about the relationship between race and representation in print and on film, while building the individual and collaborative skills you need to thrive academically and professionally.
Students will complete assigned readings before class. During our class sessions, we will complete exercises that build skills in the critical analysis of literature, photographs and film; archival and library research, and building a scholarly argument.
Questions? Please email Ms. Teya Campbell, Associate Director for the Summer Institute, at afrc.summerinstitute@gmail.com