Meet Reighan

Reighan Gillam is an ethnographer of Black visual culture. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines media at the intersection of racial ideologies, anti-racism, and protest. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that Afro-Brazilian media producers create images that render Black subjects and their experiences in complex ways. Her first book, Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media will be published in March 2022 from the University of Illinois Press. She earned a BA in Anthropology and Afro-American and African Studies from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Cornell University.  

Gillam’s next research project takes a transnational approach to the study of Black politics and culture. Her second book, entitled Diasporic Agency: Transnational Racial Leverage and Challenges to Exceptionalism examines how Afro-Brazilians engage African American people, culture, and performance. Gillam served as the Peggy Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. She was elected to the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association. 

Gillam is currently a host at the New Books Network podcast where she interviews authors about their recently published academic books. This work contributes to her efforts at publicly amplifying the work of scholars in Black Studies, Anthropology, Media Studies, and Latin American Studies.

Gillam has taught courses on Black culture and politics, visual culture, ethnography, social movements, and the African Diaspora. These courses include Ethnographic Research Methods; Black Culture and Politics in Brazil; Black Visual Culture; and Afro-Latin America. She is passionate about teaching and is committed to supporting students as they navigate their educational and professional pathways.