IBICL 2026 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Black Culture / Black Life
FACULTY GRANTS
Mauricio Acuña, Assistant Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Project Title: Mestre Pastinha: The Transnational Legacies of an Afro-Brazilian Intellectual of Capoeira
Mestre Pastinha was more than a capoeira master — he was a philosopher, a cultural architect, and a major Afro-diasporic intellectual. With IBICL support Acuña will prepare a monograph that recovers that legacy through archival research and fieldwork in Cuba, tracing how Pastinha’s teachings have traveled, transformed, and taken root across the diaspora to shape Black cultural and intellectual traditions far beyond Brazil.
Shontay Delalue, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Vinald Francis, Biomedical Illustrator
Project Title: Medical Misogynoir™: Graphic Medicine Stories from the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Issue 2)
Comics’ popular appeal and visual storytelling allow them to illuminate complex issues and reach broader audiences than conventional scholarship. Drawing on historical research and public health analysis, Delalue and Francis are producing — with IBICL support — the second issue of their graphic medicine series, bringing overlooked histories of trauma, disease, and reproductive violence rooted in the medical exploitation of African women during the transatlantic slave trade into dialogue with contemporary health disparities.
Marie Larose, Assistant Professor
Department of French and Italian
Project Title: Krik Krak: Digital Archiving of French Creole Folktales in the Caribbean
Oral traditions don’t announce when they’re disappearing. Using IBICL support to conduct fieldwork across the Caribbean, Larose is building an open-access digital archive of French Creole folktales to preserve stories carried for generations by voice and memory, and make them available to researchers, communities, and learners. The archive will also serve as a resource for mutual exchange with the communities whose traditions it preserves.
Kianna Middleton, Assistant Professor
Department of African and African American Studies
Project Title: Bearable Feelings: A Poetics of Black Autistic Expression
What does it feel like to be Black and autistic in a world that pathologizes both? Drawing on archival research in Black literature and disability history, Middleton will explore, with IBICL support, how autism is expressed and theorized in Black poetry and creative nonfiction, developing a new critical framework for understanding Black autistic affect that challenges pathologizing narratives and opens vital ground in Black, disability, and literary studies.
Ingrid Brioso Rieumont, Assistant Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Project Title: On Metaphysics and the Unborn in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
What does it mean to be born free when your mother is enslaved? In nineteenth-century Cuba, this was a legal and political crisis that lawmakers and jurists were forced to confront. With IBICL support, Rieumont draws on archival sources to examine the debates surrounding Cuba’s 1870 Free Womb Law, centering questions of personhood and legal ambiguity in the final decades of slavery — and surfacing resonances that extend into present-day conversations about bodily autonomy and recognition under the law.
Adedoyin Teriba, Assistant Professor
Department of Art History
Project Title: Architecture Dissolves into Ritual: Civilizers, Sa(u)vages, Enchantment in Modern Nigeria.
In late nineteenth-century Southwest Nigeria, diasporic settlers and local elites used architecture and material culture to assert authority and shape emerging societies; but those built environments did not remain what their builders intended. With IBICL support, Teriba will trace how structures raised to project power became sites of ritual and spiritual expression, blending African diasporic and European influences into cultural forms that exceeded and outlasted the intentions of their makers.
BOOK MANUSCRIPT AWARD
Karina Beras, Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Africana Studies, Stony Brook University
Project Title: Looking for Liberty: Nationalism, Antiblackness, and the Pursuit of Personhood in the Dominican Republic
Nationalism in the Dominican Republic is often framed through the language of sovereignty and freedom, yet it has long been mobilized to justify antiblack and anti-Haitian practices. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research, visual and media analysis, and archival work, Beras’s book manuscript examines how antiblackness is produced and sustained not only through state policy, but through cultural narratives and everyday interactions that shape life across the island. With the support of the IBICL Book Manuscript Review Award, Beras will advance Looking for Liberty toward completion, offering a vital corrective to historical accounts by centering the ongoing, lived processes through which personhood is contested in the present.
STUDENT GRANTS
Firdavs Babaev, ‘27
Computer Science
Project Title: Racial Disparities in Capital Sentencing for Black Men in the United States, 1980s–Early 2000s
The death penalty is the most irreversible decision the justice system can make and it is rarely racially neutral. In this IBICL-supported study, Babaev examines legal records, case studies, and exoneration data to understand how racial factors influenced capital sentencing outcomes for Black men between the 1980s and the early 2000s, revealing how systemic bias and resource inequalities collide to produce profoundly unequal outcomes.
Kourtney Bobb, ‘27
MPH, Geisel School of Medicine
Project Title: Whelbeing: Advancing Black Women’s Health Equity through Technology
Historically, Black women have been underserved by healthcare systems. Building on prior IBICL-supported work on medical misogynoir, Bobb is launching Whelbeing, a digital platform that assists Black women in navigating healthcare while collecting ethically grounded data to establish the evidence base to drive change in policy, education, and institutional accountability.
John Ejiogu, ‘29, M.D. Candidate
Geisel School of Medicine
Project Title: Between Race and Diaspora: Navigating Identity and Professional Spaces
It is well known that racial and cultural identities impact the practice of medicine in complex, dynamic ways. With IBICL support, Ejiogu will conduct interviews as part of a comparative analysis of how Africans, African Americans, and white Americans navigate these identities across social and professional contexts, aiming to inform more equitable approaches to collaboration and inclusion within institutions.
Alicia Cage, ‘26 (Biochemistry), Lex Dallas, ‘26 (Economics), and Esther Ojuolape, '26 (Biology)
Project Title: Cycle of Change: Period Poverty in the Black Diaspora
Menstrual health is a basic dimension of human wellbeing — yet access to products and education remains out of reach for millions across the Black diaspora. With support from the IBICL, Cage, Dallas, and Ojuolape will conduct fieldwork in Ghana in partnership with local organizations to identify the barriers sustaining period poverty and develop culturally grounded interventions that advance both gender equity and public health.
Nicholas Booth, ‘27 (Economics) and Christopher Sims, ‘27 (Engineering and Economics)
Project Title: Rhythm and Revolution: Black Music and Political Power in the Cold War Carribbean
During the Cold War, Caribbean nations mobilized music as an instrument of political identity, sovereignty, and international influence. IBICL support will allow Booth and Sims to combine historical research with fieldwork in Jamaica to trace those strategic deployments of music and the legacies that continue to shape global Black cultural expression today.