| Messias Basques is an Afro-Brazilian anthropologist. In 2018, inspired by a collective of Black undergraduate students, he co-created with them a syllabus entirely based on pioneering Black anthropologists from the African continent and the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. In 2022, the Brazilian Anthropological Association awarded the initiative the Best Teaching Project in Brazil. It also received the Award for Science Communication.
Over the past few years, he has been editing and translating into Portuguese books by Zora Neale Hurston, Sefi Atta, Junot Díaz, and John Steinbeck. In 2021, he wrote an introduction to the Brazilian edition of Barracoon: the Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston.
He graduated from the University of São Paulo with a BA in Social Sciences and earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro (2020). From July 2022 to June 2023, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University. He is one of the Fellows of the Leadership Program of the American Anthropological Association (2023). At the Department of Africana Studies, he will work on a book based on his teaching project, Black Voices in Anthropology. And he also looks forward to encouraging students to learn from and connect with Black and Indigenous authors from the Global South.
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