Topic varies.

The Accelerated Elementary Zulu course is intensive, and can be taken to fulfill a language requirement, or for linguistic preparation to do research on South Africa, Southern Africa/Africa-related topics. The course emphasizes communicative competence to enable the students to acquire linguistic and extra-linguistic skills in Zulu. The content of the course is selected from various everyday life situations to enable the students to communicate in predictable common daily settings. Culture, as it relates to language use, is also part of the course content.


Students will acquire the speaking, listening, and writing skills at the ceiling of low intermediate level and floor of high novice level, based on the ACTFL scale. The low intermediate level proficience skills that the students will acquire constitute threshold capabilities of the third semester range of proficiency to prepare students for Intermediate Zulu I course materials.

Students taking this course will learn about the historical context of HBCUs in educating African Americans, and how their role has changed since the late 1800's. Students will also be expected to connect financial, societal, and/or economic connections between the role of HBCUs past and present. Specific contemporary challenges and success related to HBCUs that will be covered relate to control, enrollment, accreditation, funding, degree completion, and outreach/retention programming. Students will become familiar with HBCUs in their own right, as well as in comparison to other postsecondary institutions.

Offered through the Penn Language Center

Continuation of Elementary Amharic I.

This course is cross-listed when the subject matter is related to African, African American, or other African Diaspora issues. Courses recently offered are, "Political Culture and American Cities, Social Movements and Social Change, Critical Race Theory. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.


This course provides a sociological perspective on race, ethnicity and immigration in the United States by examining key theories, debates, and empirical examples of social patterns related to race and ethnicity. The courseexamines two central sociological concerns: (1) the nature and persistence of racial/ethnic categories, and (2) how these categories relate to systems of social stratification as well as political and economic dynamics. The course will begin with a general overview of the major theories that drive the literature on race and ethnicity. We will then explore the topics of racial and ethnic identity construction, racial ideology, and the impact of race in social stratification systems. In this course we will also cover an important sub-field of the study of race and ethnicity - immigration - by critically exploring theoretical perspectives on assimilation and its variants. This course incorporates both classic studies of race and ethnicity as well as newer research and contemporary debates.

Storytelling, oral history, and memoir are some of the oldest formsof documenting lives. Pivoting around the themes of voice, authenticity and memory, this course considers the methods, theories and archival practices of autobiography, biography and oral history. It builds on the last two decades of scholarship that pair oral history with traditional written archival material-giving particular attention to the methodologies and practices used by African descended women and queer storytellers and listeners. During our discussions, we will consider the ethics between researcher and storyteller while addressing the following questions: How do emotions, performance, and identities (gender, sexuality, race, age, (dis)ability, etc.) inform the stories we tell and collect? How does oral history impact the contemporary construction and narration of history? How does the practice and production of black women's and queer autobiography, biography and oral history inform interdisciplinary research methods and blur narrative genres?

Using the Afro-centric philosophical understanding of the world, this course will focus on psychological issues related to African Americans, including the history of African American psychology, its application across the life span, and contemporary community issues.