African-American Studies

Choosing a topic can be the most challenging step to writing a research paper. It can be particularly difficult in a multidisciplinary subject such as African-American Studies. You may change your topic, subtopics, scopes, and approaches frequently until you find the right combination of your interest, the available literature, and the assignment's requirements.  Here are some resources to help:

• Follow the library's step-by-step guide to choosing topics;

• View an easy-to-navigate video tutorial on choosing your topic;

• Browse The African American Experience visual and textual database for ideas;

• Review recent publications and statistics available on the lower left of this page;

• Browse selected books and encyclopedias from the topic on the left;

• Visit the Africana section of the AAACNA Center on King's 5th Floor; 

• Browse Wikipedia to generate ideas, but in general, instructors do not consider Wikipedia a substantiated source. We recommend you browse it for subtopics, then locate substantiated sources in the library's holdings.

As you begin your research, you will likely find that you will need to fine-tune your topic based on the articles you find and what, if applicable, what you discover while conducting your literature review.  This is a reiterative process that will continue until you settle on your final topic or question. 

This list, originally compiled by university librarian Kathryn Blackmer-Reyes, includes common topics within social science.  These make useful keywords when searching our databases.  One way to help create your topic or research inquiry is to choose an approach from the first column and link it to one or two topics in the remaining columns.