Messias Basques is a Brazilian anthropologist. He graduated from the University of São Paulo with a BA in Social Sciences and earned a PhD in Anthropology from the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro. In 2019, inspired by a collective of Black undergraduate students, they designed a syllabus entirely based on pioneering Black anthropologists from Africa and the diaspora (vozesnegras.com/en). In 2022, the Brazilian Anthropological Association awarded the initiative the Best Teaching Project of the Year. The project also received the Award for Science Communication. In 2023, he was awarded as a Fellow of the Leadership Program of the American Anthropological Association. From 2022 to 2024, Messias was a Visiting Scholar at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Africana Studies at Williams College. Currently, he is a Lecturer at the Beniba Centre for Slavery Studies at the University of Glasgow, and the Convenor of the Master’s in Reparatory Justice, a double-degree programme in partnership with the University of the West Indies, Jamaica and Barbados. His research and teaching projects focus on Indigenous peoples in Brazil, and African and Black diasporic contributions to Anthropology.
