African Studies Center, Michigan State University
Open-knowledge reference entry
Founded in 1960, the African Studies Center (ASC) at Michigan State University (MSU) is a major academic center for the study of Africa and one of 11 "Title VI National Resource Centers on Africa designated by the U.S. Department of Education. The Center’s strength is based on the more than 160 MSU faculty who provide research, teaching, and service on Africa. Center faculty have research, projects, and expertise in 32 African nations.
African languages
MSU offers instruction in up to 32 African languages and teaches 9-12 languages each year and intensive African languages in the summer. The Center is home to the national e-LCTL Initiative, with a website that a) catalogs the 220+ "Less Commonly Taught Languages" (LCTLs) offered in the more than 120 Title VI National Resource Centers of Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and Canada, b) offers essays on priorities among LCTL languages for instruction in the U.S., and c) provides a database of "web objects" for teaching some LCTLs. See also the Center's Webbook of the African Languages, a directory of description, texts, and experts for 82 important African languages.
Library
The MSU Africana Library collection is served by two PhD Africanist librarians, more than 237,000 items, and a large annual budget. The Library hosts the "African e-Journals Project," a directory of journals about Africa and full-text of 11 African journals online. It also houses the African Activist Archive, which preserves records and memories of activism in the U.S. to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s. The project holds the physical deposits at MSU of records of many activist organizations and individuals.
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This entry incorporates text from “African Studies Center, Michigan State University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.