Students who choose to study Black Studies explore and participate in the history of the African and Afro-diasporic community of thinkers and makers. Bennington’s interdisciplinary and student-designed approach to learning helps students draw on various resources to gain new insights and develop their own perspectives on the representations of Blackness and the Black body.

Black Studies interrogates the assumptions, objects of study, practices and limits of other established disciplines. Students who focus on Black Studies complete culminating projects that include research on specific issues, development of informed and innovative thinking, and/or creation of new ways to express and communicate understanding of Black Studies. Black Studies graduates work in scientific research, policy development, law, education, social studies and advocacy/activism, dance, theater and performance, literature and creative writing, and curatorial contexts and art.

At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.

From their first year in the Lab, students are encouraged to make their own choices about study possibilities through discussions with and mentoring by their advisors and faculty members. In taking responsibility for their own educational pathways, emerging artists discover how they want to situate their voice in relation to the world. This sort of choice-making is crucial for advanced dance artistry and professional work in associated fields, and the curriculum expects engaged, direct participation in the learning process. Within the BFA Dance Lab curriculum, students are encouraged to discover their interests, articulate their perspectives, and situate themselves as participants capable of developing new relationships to dance and to the world.

The approach to teaching Spanish at Bennington is unlike those of most programs across the United States. We teach language by engaging with a student’s intellectual identity. The faculty design courses knowing that students have more fulfilling experiences with texts, materials, and spoken language when they have a personal reason for doing so, and when they are actively engaged in the process. Each Spanish class at Bennington College is organized around a single culturally relevant concept, literary figure or movement, political period, artistic medium, or genre.

At Bennington, you design your own course of study and work, taking full advantage of the College’s resources both inside and outside the classroom. This process goes beyond the bounds of a traditional major. You identify one or more areas of interest that spark your intellectual curiosity and provide a foundation for your academic work and fieldwork, and you pursue that work with ongoing guidance from your faculty. This is your Plan.