Florida State University's Afro-Latinx Prize Went to a Non-Afro-Latino Scholar and It Raises a Question About How Far Cultural Appreciation Can Go

Florida State University's Afro-Latinx Prize Went to a Non-Afro-Latino Scholar and It Raises a Question About How Far Cultural Appreciation Can Go

Academic prizes exist to signal what a field values, who it trusts and whose work it believes deserves to represent a given subject to the world. At the 114th annual conference of the College Art Association this past February, Associate Professor Paul Niell, who teaches at Florida State University, received the 2026 ALAA/LASA-VCS Afro-Latin American/Afro-Latinx Scholarship Prize for his essay about an enslaved woman named Juana Agripina in 19th…