Dr. Prisca Gayles

Prisca Gayles is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender, Race and Identity at the University of Nevada at Reno. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies, with Doctoral Portfolios in African and African Diaspora Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Gayles investigates the role of emotions in transnational Black social movements with a broader research goal of understanding the diverse ways that blackness is politicized across the African diaspora and used as a tool to demand racial justice in spaces of black invisibility. Her current book project, Pain into Purpose: Mobilizing Emotions in Argentina's Black Resistance Movement, draws from a twenty-two-month ethnography to analyze how emotions permeate the macro- and micro-politics of Argentina's Black social movement. The book is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Dr. Gayles's research has received funding from the Tinker Foundation, The U.S. Fulbright Program, a Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellowship at Williams College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her research interests include Black feminist theory, Afro-Latin American feminisms, the sociology of race and ethnicity, social movements, Migration and citizenship, and the African diaspora in Argentina. Currently, her work can be found in The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-based Markets (Palgrave MacMillan 2018), Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (University of Pittsburgh 2022), Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and Translation Across the Americas (University of Texas at Austin Press 2023) and the journals of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Gender, Place, and Culture.