Prisca Gayles, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender, Race, and Identity
Prisca Gayles
she, her, hers / ella

Summary

Prisca Gayles holds a Ph.D. in Latin American studies, with doctoral portfolios in African and African Diaspora studies and women’s and gender studies, from the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining the University of Nevada, Reno, she was the Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellow in Africana Studies at Williams College from 2018-2020. She is a former U.S. Fulbright and Tinker Foundation Fellow. Gayles investigates how blackness is politicized to demand racial justice in spaces of Black invisibility. Her current research includes a 22-month ethnography of how emotions permeate the macro and micro-politics of Argentina’s Black social movement.

Research interests

  • Sociology of race and ethnicity
  • Social movements
  • Migration and citizenship
  • Black feminist theory
  • Transnational Black feminisms
  • African Diaspora in Argentina

Selected publications

  • Gayles, Prisca. 2021. “¿De dónde sos?: (Black) Argentina and the Mechanisms of Maintaining Racial Myths.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. 44 (11): 2093-2112.
  • Gayles, Prisca and Diane Ghogomu. 2018. “The Social Economy of Africans and African Descendants in Buenos Aires.” Pg. 119-142, in The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-based Markets. Edited by Caroline Hossein. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Courses taught

  • GRI 103: Introduction to Intersectional Analysis of Identities (Fall 2020, 2021)
  • GRI: 257: Social Movements of Gender, Race, and Identity (Spring 2020)
  • SOC 345: Social Movements and Collective Behavior (Spring 2020)
  • SOC 408: Qualitative Research (Fall 2021)

Curriculum Vitae

Education

  • Ph.D., Latin American studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2020
  • M.A., Latin American, Caribbean and Latino studies, University of South Florida, 2013
  • B.A., Hispanic languages and literature, University of Pittsburgh, 2010