ITHACA, N.Y. – A black transgender assistant professor at Cornell just got $30,000 from the government to write a book about the history of “black transness” in America.

Cornell assistant professor of Africana studies C. Riley Snorton recently received the National Endowment for the Humanities – Schomburg Center Scholar-in-Residence fellowship, according to the Cornell Chronicle.

The National Endowment for the Humanities website states fellowship recipients receive “a six-month stipend of $30,000, use of a furnished office space at the Schomburg Center (in New York City), and access to research assistants and advice from the Center’s curatorial staff.”

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The idea of the program is to boost academics “whose research and writing on black history and culture would benefit from extended access to the Center’s resources” which include “manuscript collections, bound volumes, microforms, photographic images, and serials from the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Europe, India, and Australia.”

Snorton, one of Black Entertainment Television’s “Ten Transgender People You Should Know,” plans to spend his time and money at Schomburg studying up for his new book on two eras of black “transness” in America – when slaves changed the appearance of their sex to escape the south in the mid-1850s and the 20th century, when “people are exploring and codifying how genitals ‘should look,’ and creating medical discourse to normalize what genitalia looks like,” he told the Chronicle.

And as Snorton is contemplating “black transness” on the public’s dime, the 2015 federal budget deficit sits at about a half-trillion dollars, USA Today reports. The federal debt is currently about $18 trillion and climbing by the minute, according to USDebtClock.org.

But Snorton said he plans to put his fellowship money to good use answering important questions about “the relation between how we think about blackness and something we would call transness … a kind of open-ended, non-normative gender articulation,” he told the Chronicle.

“What do these stories of gender revelation and gender transformation (in the Schomburg archives) tell us about the politics of integration and our understanding of the period, referred to as the long civil rights?” Snorton wonders.

The fellowship funding will aid Snorton in building on his first book: “Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low,” which focused on “black men who have sex with men and women and do not identify as gay or bisexual,” he told the Chronicle.

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“Of course the full book looks at a variety of things – the genealogy of the term ‘down low’ itself, about the dynamics it is supposed to reflect. I ask: What about duplicitous sexuality, about factors of race, and drawing on and elaborating on the work of (‘Boundaries of Blackness’ author) Cathy Cohen. I also think about it in relationship to the ‘state’ story of how HIV/AIDS works,” Snorton said.

The Chronicle reports Snorton first identified as a transgender person in college, prompting him to write “Nobody Is Supposed to Know.”

In the book, Snorton also closely examines the rap opera “Trapped in the Closet,” which he believes epitomizes the closeted gay black man as “a figure who is by all accounts undetectable and also omnipresent, and is being described (by the federal Centers for Disease Control) as the cause of increased rates of HIV/AIDS cases among African-American women,” Snorton said.