At Williams College, Africana Studies is a thriving interdisciplinary academic major that critically and systematically examines the cultures, histories, and experiences of people of African descent globally, and that grounds students in their multiple ways of knowing. Through a wide variety of courses and programming in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, we take up the broader concerns of Africana Studies as a field, merge them with our dynamic faculty expertise and interests, and combine them with the educational needs of our diverse student population to encourage multi and interdisciplinary research, writing, and analysis. Even as intellectual rigor is a significant programmatic focus, we also recognize the importance of grounding intellectual engagement with activism and life experience, and we assist students in finding unique and compelling perspectives from which to pursue and to make their own contributions to the field of Africana Studies.