By Vanessa Haro-Miracle

The Co-Directors

The African-American Studies minor at Ball State is still pretty new, but its co-directors, Dr. Emily Rutter and Dr. Kiesha Warren-Gordon, are committed to bringing this course of study to as many students at Ball State as possible, no matter their major.

Dr. Emily Rutter is the author of two books: Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line (University Press of Mississippi, May 2018), and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry (University of Alabama Press, Fall 2018).

Her essays about African-American and Multi-Ethnic American literature have been published in the journals African American Review, South Atlantic Review, Studies in American Culture, Aethlon, and MELUS. Her book chapter on African American women poets appears in A Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Her co-edited volume of scholarly essays and poetry, Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era, will be published by Routledge in October 2019.

Dr. Kiesha Warren-Gordon is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Ball State University. She received her Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. Her substantive areas include criminology, race and ethnicity. Her research explores the intersection of race and class in the miscarriage of justice, violence, and intercultural conflict. Her teaching interests are victimology, multiculturalism, the death penalty, and criminal justice process.

The Curriculum

The minor in African American Studies is just 16 credit hours.

Creating this minor didn’t require Drs. Rutter and Warren-Gordon to create lots of new courses; Ball State already offered courses that focused on African-Americans in many different fields: architecture, communication studies, criminal justice and criminology, English, history, political science, psychology, sociology, and telecommunications.

Dr. Warren-Gordon and Dr. Rutter merely brought these courses together under a new umbrella. To create a more coherent curriculum, they designated three courses that will “bookend” the minor and be required of all African-American Studies students beginning Fall 2019:

1.) Introduction to African-American Studies (AfAm 100)

2.) African-American Studies Theory and Research Methods (AfAm 200)

3.) African-American Studies Capstone (AfAm 400)

After that, students choose two more electives from a menu that includes courses from 9 different departments, which means that students can tailor the minor to their particular interests.

The Menu of Courses

ARCH	407	Fourth World Theory (3)
COMM	322	Comm and Popular Culture (3)
COMM	385	Rhet of Marginalized Voices (3)
CJC	211	Race, Gender, and Crime (3)
ENG	215	Introduction to African American Literature (3)
ENG	491	Lit of African American Trad (3)
HIST	210	Introduction to Black History (3)
HIST	405	Pre-Civil War America, 1800-48 (3)
HIST	407	US Civil War and Reconstruct (3)
HIST	416	Pre-Civil War South, 1776-1861 (3)
HIST	441	Comparative Slavery (3)
POLS	475	Minority Group Politics (3)
PSYS	325	Psych Prejudice Discrimination (3)
SOC	221	Intro Race and Ethnic Relat (3)
SOC	333	Sociology of Media (3)
SOC	421	Racial and Cultural Minor US (3)
TCOM	363	Film Genres (3)

Why you should add this minor

Are you wondering how to make sense of events like Ferguson and Charlottesville? 

I suggest that anyone who is interested in current events and wants to know how their interests can relate to Black and American culture take a class or two, or even the whole minor.

I am so glad this program is now offered, and I hope people rush to add it as a minor. I wish I had time to!