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Department of Humanities and Fine Arts

African American Studies

African American Studies

African American Studies College of Arts and Sciences | Department of Humanities and Fine Arts | Minor

This interdisciplinary, comparative, and cross-cultural unit of courses allows students to examine critically important information derived from a variety of academic disciplines included in the broad fields of African Studies and African Diaspora Studies. The minor encompasses courses that cover the histories, sociopolitical constructs, religions, literature, music, and philosophies of African and African-descendant peoples. Beyond the acquisition of knowledge, the minor in African and African American Studies will introduce students to methodologies for the application of their acquired knowledge through internships, research projects, and perspectives about social change.

African American Studies Staff Directory

  • Ms. Anne V Cirella-Urrutia

    Adjunct Faculty Teaching

    Anne Cirella-Urrutia teaches French and cultures of the Frenchspeaking world at Huston-Tillotson University (Austin, TX) since the spring 2000. She earned in 1998 a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin and has earned a DEA degree from Université Paul Valéry at Montpellier, France in 1991. She specializes in theater for the youth, children’s literature and graphic novels. Several articles on children’s theater appeared in various journals and collection of essays in France, Africa, Turkey, Romania, Spain, Italy and the USA. She publised an ecocritical reading of Mwankumi’s picture books in Aspects Ecocritiques de l’imaginaire africain, edited by Etienne-Marie Lassi (African Books Collective, 2013). An essay on historical graphic novels entitled “Heroes and Heroines of the Great War: The Aesthetics of Horror in bandes dessinées’ appeared in Heroic Misery: The First World War in the Intellectual, Literary and Artistic Memory of the European Cultures (Peter Lang, 2014). She contributed with another chapter on historical graphic novels entitled “World War One in Bande Dessinée: La Semaine de Suzette and The Birth of a Breton Heroine at War!’ in Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I (Palgrave Macmillan,2015).

    She also published an ecocritical reading of the Congolese Dominique Mwnakumi’s picture books in Literatur und Ökologie: Neue literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Christiane Solte-Gresser & Claudia Schmitt (Eds.) AISTHESIS VERLAG Bielefeld 2017 & in France in a collection of essays entitled Echo-graphies: écologie et littératurespour la jeunesse by N. Prince & S. Thiltges (Presses U de Rennes, 2018). She published in Italy an ecocritial article in a collection of essays entitled Mots De Faune, edited by Marinella Termite in 2020. An online article on two historical graphic novels appeared in the Italian review Status Quaestionis, in July 2021. Recently, she published an ecocritical analysis of two French graphic novels in a collection of essays entitled Weaving
    Words into Worlds edited by Caroline Durand-Rous & Margot Lauwers (Vernon Press, 2023).

    Cirella-Urrutia published many book reviews in her areas of expertise in L’Esprit Créateur, The French Review, European Comic Art, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, ChLA Quarterly Journal, French Forum, Irish Journal of French Studies & Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature (STTCL). She has been the President of the Central Texas American Association of Teachers of French (AATF) from 2008 until May of 2024. She is very eager to share her love of foreign languages and specifically the cultures of the Francophone world to her students at HT.

African American Studies

Staff Directory