Prisca Gayles, an assistant professor of Sociology and Gender, Race and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno, has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for her ethnographic research on Argentina’s Black social movement.

Gayles’ project is one of just 204 humanities projects awarded by the NEH this funding cycle. Additionally, she is the only awardee from Nevada this year.

“I am so thrilled to have received the NEH fellowship,” Gayles said. “This research has been a huge part of my life since 2012, and the NEH will provide me with the opportunity to dedicate myself full-time to this work. I am humbled and honored to have my work recognized by a national organization dedicated to supporting humanistic scholarship.”

With the grant from the NEH, Gayles plans to write a book on how contemporary Argentinian activists have changed and engaged with the country’s widespread denial of Black history and anti-Black sentiment.

“I am excited to get to work on the completion of my book manuscript,” Gayles said. “The book will contribute to our understanding of how Blackness is politicized across the African diaspora and used as a tool to demand racial justice in spaces of Black invisibility. Taking Argentina as a case study, I employ a multi-year ethnography of Black political organizing to explore how activists grapple with a history of erasure and denial of an Argentinian Black past and present to raise consciousness, increase social movement participation and mobilize resources.”