Professor of Anthropology Matthew Reilly was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Bard Graduate Center this semester, where he will be working on a book based on his nearly ten years of archaeological, archival, and anthropological research in the United States, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Professor Reilly describes the project as “an exploration of geopolitical, bodily, and unfulfilled sovereignty. I aim to study how individuals and communities of the African Diaspora envisioned and enacted freedom. These processes reflect the multiple, complex, and often competing ways in which sovereignty could be both an attainable aspiration and denied desire.”
Professor Reilly shared what makes this new project different from his previous endeavors: “With nineteenth-to-twentieth-century case studies coming from the American South, Barbados, and Liberia, this book shifts the terrain of African Diaspora archaeology, pushing the field beyond its traditional Africa-to-the-Americas scope and critically engaging with the politics of African Diasporic emancipatory visions.”
Professor Reilly, who has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Programs since 2017, has long gained recognition for his work in the Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology project in Liberia, including a grant from the National Geographic Society that helped fund unprecedented excavations in the region in order to bring to light little-known nuances of settler-native relations.
You can learn more about Professor Reilly’s work in this interview.
