Summary
Prisca Gayles 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 UT- 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 and is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Dr. Gayles’s research and community-engaged work has received funding from the Tinker Foundation, The U.S. Fulbright Program, the Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellowship at Williams College, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). 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.
Selected Publications
- Gayles, P. and Florencia Gomes. 2023. “Black Feminist(s) Work in Argentina.” In Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and Translation Across the Americas, edited by Christen A. Smith and Lorraine Leu, pg. 41-57. Austin, TX: The University of Texas at Austin Press.
- Gayles, P. 2023. “¿Qué vendes morena?: Unpacking the Transnational Bodily Territorialization of Black Women in Buenos Aires.” Gender, Place, and Culture, 30 (3): 439-459.
- Gayles, P. and M. Muñoz-Muñoz. 2023. “Unveiling Latin American White Multiculturalism: Black Women’s Politics in Argentina and Costa Rica.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. 18 (2): 200-216.
- Gayles, P. 2022. “Poner el Cuerpo: A History of Black Activism in Argentina.” In Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability, edited by Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar and Héctor Nicolás Ramos Flores, pg. 25-43. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
- Gayles, P. 2022. (Book Review). Paulina L. Alberto, Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 510, £25.00 hb; $29.95 hb; E-book. Journal of Latin American Studies, 54(4), 758-761. doi:10.1017/S0022216X22000840
- Gayles, P. 2021. “¿De dónde sos?: (Black) Argentina and the Mechanisms of Maintaining Racial Myths.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44 (11): 2093-2112.
- Gayles, P. and D. Ghogomu. 2018. “The Social Economy of Africans and African Descendants in Buenos Aires.” In The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-based Markets, edited by Caroline Hossein, 119-142. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Courses taught
- GRI 103: Introduction to Intersectional Analysis of Identities
- GRI: 257: Social Movements of Gender, Race, and Identity
- GRI 730: Theories of Oppression (Graduate Course)
- SOC 345: Social Movements and Collective Behavior
- SOC 408: Qualitative Research
- SOC/GRI 490: Class, Race, and Gender
- SOC 728: Collective Behavior and Mass Society (Graduate Course)
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