Emory University’s new African American studies Ph.D. program will send out acceptance letters to the first cohort of students by the end of the first week of February, according to Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies Dianne Stewart, who also serves as interim African American studies department chair.
The Ph.D. program, which is aiming to accept four students out of 105 applicants for fall 2023, is the first African American studies Ph.D. program in the Southeast and the first African American studies Ph.D. program at a private university in the South. The African American studies department also expects to enroll four new Ph.D. students each year, according to the program description.
The doctoral program comes 52 years after Emory created the first degree-granting African American studies program in the South in 1971. Stewart and Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies Carol Anderson, who is on leave for the 2022-23 academic year, helped establish the Ph.D. program.
“The Ph.D. program in African American studies is something that we have worked so hard for and is so necessary, given the situation where we are right now in terms of understanding the inequities in America, how we got here and how we get out,” Anderson wrote in a press release.
Stewart noted that Emory’s program will have the largest collection of African American studies Ph.D. faculty in the United States. The program will be staffed by 14 core faculty from the African American studies department, as well as a network of over 40 affiliated graduate faculty from the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, the Candler School of Theology, the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and the Rollins School of Public Health.
“At the same time, we have considered the needs of our graduate program in our hiring plan for the next three years, and we do expect to grow our faculty as we continue to meet important benchmarks that indicate our commitment to excellence and eminence in our teaching, research, engaged scholarship and service to Emory and the wider society,” Stewart wrote in an email to the Wheel.
Located in Atlanta, the cradle of the modern civil rights movement, Emory’s program will provide doctoral students “access to institutions, organizations and local histories and cultures at the very heart of African American political and cultural developments in the South, the U.S. and the broader African diaspora,” according to the program description.
Stewart told the Wheel that the Ph.D. program will encourage more “cutting-edge” research in the field.
“It invigorates not just our research faculty in engaging with the doctoral students but also brings a lot of energy and vigor to our undergraduate curriculum,” Stewart said. “It was very important for us to truly live into the research and teaching mission of our department, the college and of the wider university.”
In the program, students will participate in theoretical conversations and debates, pondering questions such as what it means to train for a Ph.D. in African American studies and become a public scholar.
“We want students who are deeply engaged and invested in what it means to become a scholar, a producer of knowledge and who are not afraid to live deeply into the mission of African American studies as a discipline from its inception,” Stewart said.
Students will also attend professional development workshops to “have real engagement with alternative career pathways from the very beginning,” Professor of African American Studies and History Walter Rucker, who chairs the faculty committee behind the program’s implementation, noted in the press release.
The program will have three cognate fields for students to choose from: gender and sexuality, social justice and social movements and expressive arts and culture.
The gender and sexuality field will focus on the interrelation between gender, sexuality and race to “shape social understandings of personhood,” according to the program description. The social justice and social movements field will emphasize African Americans’ individual and organizational efforts to combat structural racism, and the expressive arts and culture field will explore African Americans’ regional, national and global contributions to this field.
“What is so powerful about this Ph.D. program is that it not only trains scholars, but also trains people to work outside the academy so that they can bring that expertise to public policy positions, to cultural art positions, to [non-governmental organizations],” Anderson wrote in the press release.
The African American studies department expects Ph.D. candidates to complete the program in five to six years. All students will be fully funded for five years and will receive an annual stipend of at least $34,000, along with a tuition remission and health insurance. There will also be an option for a sixth year of funding if needed.
All admitted doctoral students will also be assigned an advising team who will serve as mentors.
“We want to make sure we pour as much mentoring and advising as we can into each student,” Rucker wrote.
Reflecting on why Emory is the first university in the Southeast and the first private university in the South to have an African American studied Ph.D. program, Stewart pointed to the “lack of vision from leadership and a lack of critical mass” at other universities.
“It is truly important to have a vision and a mission of a university that clearly emphasizes support for the mission of African American studies as an ‘intellectual study,’” Stewart said. “In many institutions, that struggle to be seen as a legitimate discipline with research problems that matter is still a question, is still a challenge, is still a fight.”
