2021-22 Events

SARAH BRUNO is the ACLS Emerging Voices Race and Digital Technologies postdoctoral fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute and in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her research and art lie at the intersections of performance, diaspora, and digitality. She is currently creating a digital exhibition of the Fernando Pico papers and is a member of LifeXCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure and Taller Electric Marronage. The Pico Papers informs her first manuscript, Re-Sounding Resistencia, where she uses the Afro-Puerto Rican genre of bomba as a site and method in constructing a cartography of Black Puerto Rican femme feeling throughout history. She charges herself to continue to write with care about the never-ending process of enduring, imagining, thriving, and healing in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Dr. Bruno was recently a Mellon ACLS Dissertation Fellow and the 2020 awardee of the Association of Black Anthropologists Vera Green Prize for Public Anthropology.

PRISCILLA FERREIRA is Assistant Professor in Geography and Latinx and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She recently served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Black and Latinx Studies in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies and the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas in Austin (2019-2021). Her research interests lie in the intersection of class, race, and gender in Latin American societies, particularly in Brazil, and their resulting geographical patterns of racialized uneven economic geographies. She has been organizing with communities of color inside and outside of academia, over the past twenty years and collaborated in a number of popular education projects. Her current book project centers women-led community economies around struggles for housing and childcare in the favela City of God, Rio de Janeiro.

PRISCA GAYLES is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender, Race, and Identity Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. She earned 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 in 2020. Before joining the University of Nevada, 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. Dr. Gayles is an interdisciplinary scholar who investigates how emotions matter in understanding transnational black social movements. Her current research includes a twenty-two-month ethnography of how emotions permeate the macro- and micro-politics of Argentina’s Black social movement. 

ALESSANDRA LEBEA WILLIAMS is an assistant professor of dance at Rutgers University-New Brunswick who researches dance, transnational feminism and queer performance, and African American and Asian American culture. Her fellowships include the Inclusive Excellence Fellowship (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater 2018–19), Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship (University of California, Los Angeles 2010–14), and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (Macalester College 2005–07). She has performed with the Ananya Dance Theatre company and is coeditor with Ananya Chatterjea and Hui Niu Wilcox of the anthology Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice (University of Washington Press 2022). Her current book project explores queer sexuality, gender, and race through dances and films by David Roussève/REALITY dance company.