Our department has a long history of being a campus leader on this front. When it was created out of the Program in American Civilization, its founding document called for establishing the first Asian American and Latino Studies positions to join already established positions in the still-new fields of Women's Studies, African American Studies, Labor History and popular culture. Following this origin point, for the past thirty years the department - its faculty and its students - has played a leading role in producing important scholarship on class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Scholarship by its faculty and the sizeable number of doctoral students they have trained has played a significant role in the shaping of American Studies as a critical method that is interdisciplinary, intersectional, and attentive to race, gender, and difference in local, national, and global contexts. More formally, in its Standards and Criteria for the Comprehensive Review, the department confirms that it is strongly committed to diversity, broadly conceived to include demographic, intellectual, methodological, and subfield diversity. In its reflections on future hiring, curriculum development, student recruitment, and many other matters, it takes this strong commitment into account. American Studies has, then, long been a leader on campus when it comes to creating new understandings of difference and power, to the broadening of the pipeline, to mentoring undergraduates from marginalized communities into graduate degree programs, and to doing the same for doctoral students, and, more recently, for postdoctoral fellows and faculty. With this history in mind, the department takes up the subjects of diversity and inclusion intersectionally, as they relate to people of color, citizens and descendants of sovereign indigenous nations, and historically underrepresented and marginalized communities - including LGBTQI, low income, undocumented, and first generation college students, and people living with disabilities. (From the original 2016 American Studies Departmental Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan)

Since 2016, the department has convened a DDIAP Committee every year to assess current issues in this area and make action recommendations. Community members are encouraged to contact the current Chair of the department with any questions or suggestions for the current DDIAP committee. You may also wish to consult administrative staff or learn more about University-level initiatives in this area via Brown's Office of Diversity and Inclusion.