The Department of African American Studies is proud to share that Professors Wallace Best and Lorgia García Peña have been awarded 2025–26 grants from the Humanities Council in recognition of their visionary and collaborative work in the humanities.

Wallace Best will lead The Harlem Walks Project, a video archive documenting a walking history of Harlem. Through conversations with artists, scholars, activists, and urbanists, the project will capture reflections on the neighborhood’s rich historical and cultural significance. A public conference in Fall 2025 will also be recorded. The archive will be housed at both Princeton University Library and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Lorgia García Peña, in collaboration with Medhin Paolos (Lewis Center for the Arts), will lead Black in the World, a multilingual, transnational digital humanities archive that explores Black life across the globe. The archive is being developed with contributions from both graduate and undergraduate students and will launch in May 2026 with a public roundtable, performance, and dialogue featuring Black scholars and artists from Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

These faculty-led projects exemplify African American Studies’ ongoing commitment to public scholarship, global engagement, and interdisciplinary research rooted in community and history.