Colin Powell School professor receives National Geographic Society grant

Matthew Reilly, assistant professor of Anthropology, Gender Studies and International Studies in the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at The City College of New York, is a recipient of a grant from the National Geographic Society. The grant will support a month of archaeological research to explore sites associated with the 19th century settlement of formerly enslaved and free Afro-Barbadians and African Americans in coastal Liberia.

Reilly received $26,658 in funding for his collaborative project entitled "The Archaeology of the Back-to-Africa Movement in Liberia: From Settlement to Post-Conflict Heritage Building.” It includes measures to assist in building heritage infrastructure through a collaboration with the National Museum of Liberia.​​

Reilly and his team are interested in learning more about the complicated relationship between settlers—mostly the formerly enslaved from Barbados and the United States—and native Liberians through architecture, material culture and oral histories. His work in Liberia is an extension of previous and ongoing archaeological researching in Barbados, which is the subject of his upcoming book, “Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society.”

Professor Reilly holds a Ph.D. from Syracuse University and is trained as a historical archaeologist interested in issues of race, class, colonialism and heritage throughout the Atlantic World. In the summer of 2018, Dr. Reilly led a team of CCNY students to Barbados to conduct archaeological excavations on a former sugar plantation— looking for material culture associated with the enslaved who once lived and labored on its grounds.

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