Scholarship in the Humanities | Global Racial Justice

Scholarship in the Humanities | Global Racial Justice
Scholarship in the Humanities
Rising Scholars: Support Opportunities for Early and Mid-Career Scholars
Celebrating our Postdoctoral Fellowship Program!
Proudly, we celebrate the completion of our ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellowship program.
Launched in
2021
, this humanities-centered fellowship has supported
16 doctoral recipients
whose research demonstrated a deep investment in the areas of inquiry related to anti-racism and social inequality.
Since their time with us, these scholars have gone on to tenure-track positions at distinguished academic institutions such as the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service
Lehman College-CUNY, Barnard College at Columbia University, Temple University, Towson University, Fordham University and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in fields ranging from Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies; Education and Urban Studies, and Criminal Justice to Language and Literature; Culture and Politics; History, and the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Our thanks to all the Rutgers faculty who served as colleagues and mentors, and we wish them all well in their next endeavors!
Charles Senteio Receives Provost Award for Excellence in Community/Publicly Engaged Scholarship
Congratulations to Charles Senteio (Associate Professor of Library and Information Science, Rutgers SC&I) for receiving the Rutgers New Brunswick Provost Award for Excellence in Community/Publicly Engaged Scholarship! This award honors a faculty member (Assistant or Associate, tenure track or non-tenure track) whose scholarship integrates community engagement as a vital component of their work.
Decoding Race, Racialization, and Racism
Congratulations to ISGRJ Named Term Chair Melissa M. Valle on the publication of her latest article in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. "Decoding Race, Racialization, and Racism: Making Meaning through Interviews, Photo–elicitation, and Visual Resonance." The paper draws on qualitative research conducted in Santiago, Chile and Cartagena, Colombia.
The Health Humanities, Communication, and Informatics (HHCI) Working Group Awarded Research Grant!
The Office of the Vice Provost for Research (OVPR) has awarded the HCCI Working Group funding to support work on their project,
Empowering Sleep Health: A Culturally Tailored Online Intervention for Black Pregnant Women
, through Rutgers-New Brunswick OVPR Behavioral Health and Equity Pilot Seed Funding. Black pregnant women in New Jersey experience maternal mortality rates over seven times higher than White women, driven by systemic inequities and higher rates of pregnancy complications.
Cassandra Vega Named Gates Cambridge Scholar!
We proudly celebrate and congratulate Cassie Vega (RU-NB '24) for being named a Gates Cambridge Scholar! The scholarship, one of the most prestigious international postgraduate opportunities available, is awarded to outstanding students from outside the United Kingdom and covers the full cost of studying at the University of Cambridge in England. Vega was the co-founder of the Fellows in Racial Justice Learning Community (RAJU) at the ISGRJ.
Neo-Colonialism, Underdevelopment, and the Making of a Radical Pan-African and Leftist Economic Institute, 1970–80
Congratulations to Early Career Faculty Fellow Bright Gyamfi on the publication of his latest article in the flagship
Journal of African History,
circulated online by Cambridge University Press. Drawing on institutional records, working papers, interviews, memos, and published and unpublished papers, this article centers Africans and African institutions engaged in development thinking in the larger history of economic thought in the 1970s and 1980s.
This Is How the Child Welfare System Becomes Less Traumatizing
Wisconsin has shown that it’s cost-effective and completely possible to keep families together by stabilizing their housing. Some child welfare advocates, including
Frank Edwards
, associate professor of sociology at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow, want to make the case that the funding should be used to provide parents with direct financial support. Read the recent article in
The Nation
Uncovering Radical Histories: Anna Budu-Arthur’s Everyday Politics of Decolonization and Transnational Solidarity
Congratulations to Early Career Faculty Fellow
Bright Gyamfi
on the publication of his latest article in the
Radical History Review
(Duke University Press). The article foregrounds the life and times of Anna Budu-Arthur—a Ghanaian political organizer, middle-school leaver, and seamstress in Ghana’s attainment of independence from Britain in 1957.
Michael Conteh joins the NYU Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora
Congratulations to 2023-2024 ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellow
Michael Conteh
for joining NYU's Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) as a visiting scholar.
CSAAD's mission is to advance cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary research on both Africa and its diaspora in ways that bring that scholarship into sustained conversation.
Hugo Bujon Appointed Assistant Professor of French at Lehman College-CUNY
Congratulations to ISGRJ 2022–2023 Postdoctoral Fellow,
Hugo Bujon
, for accepting a tenure-track position at Lehman College-CUNY starting this fall!
Hugo will join the Lehman College faculty as assistant professor of French literature, language and culture, with a specialization in Africana Studies.
Emergency Department Visits Among Children with Asthma: Racial/Ethnic Disparities before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Nursing at Rutgers-Camden and ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow,
Sangita Pudasainee-Kapri
, on the publication of her paper in
Nursing Outlook
. The paper examines the trends in asthma ED visits, focusing on the effects of sociodemographic factors and pandemic influence among school-aged children before, during, and after the pandemic.
2024–2025 Faculty Year-End Excellence Award Recipients
Congratulations to ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellows
Jameson Sweet,
Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers–New Brunswick, for being awarded the Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, and to
Akil Kumarasamy,
Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, for being awarded the Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence.
Advancing a Transnational Ecological Systems Framework for Research on Exposure to Violence
Congratulations to Inaugural ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellow
Franklin Moreno
and Professor
Paul Boxer
(Psychology, Rutgers-Newark) for their recently published article in the
Developmental Review
journal furthering their research on children’s and adolescents’ experiences with community violence involving gangs and law enforcement in Honduras and how transnational relations between countries shape the local environments in which children and adolescents grow up.
Kim D. Butler receives the 2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
Congratulations to Kim Butler, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Rutgers New-Brunswick, and Project Director of Insurgent Intersections: Combating Global Anti-Blackness, one of the first funded research projects at the ISGRJ.
Butler been named a 2025 recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to complete a book on Black Power as it expressed itself through Black carnival groups known as Blocos Afros.
Dr. Jesse Bayker Honored with New Jersey Historical Commission Award of Recognition
Congratulations to Jesse Bayker for receiving the New Jersey Historical Commission's Award of Recognition!
This award is in honor of his work leading the New Jersey Slavery Records, an initiative of the Scarlet and Black Research Center at Rutgers University supported by the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice in New Brunswick under the leadership of former ISGRJ campus director Erica Armstrong Dunbar.
After the Fires, Job Losses and Deportation Threats, L.A.’s Migrant Workers Are Under Immense Stress
Across Los Angeles, an untold number of immigrant domestic workers and service workers are grappling with not only the loss of their jobs and incomes due to the fires that destroyed thousands of homes across the region, but also the threat of mass deportations under the Trump administration, which is making it difficult for some to look for new jobs or feel safe accessing services. Read the piece in De Los (LA Times) featuring ECFF Germán A. Cadenas (GSAPP).
Luis Rivera Wins NSF Grant to Study Relationship Between Colonial History and Racial Identity in Puerto Rico
Congratulations to Psychology Professor and Vice Provost in RU-N's Office of the Chancellor Luis Rivera, who won a $850K National Science Foundation grant for his ISGRJ-funded project:
The Role of Colonialism in Puerto Ricans' Implicit and Explicit Racial Identities and Stereotypes
, examining the role of colonialism in Puerto Ricans’ racial identities and stereotypes.
Salamishah Tillet Receives Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowships
Congratulations to Pulitzer prize-winning Rutgers-Newark professor and ISGRJ Senior Faculty Fellow Salamishah Tillet for being awarded the Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing from the Gordon Parks Foundation. The foundation’s fellowship supports work on representation and social justice inspired by Parks’s legendary photography, writing, and filmmaking. Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing and the executive director of Express Newark.
Dario Vásquez-Padilla appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Congratulations to ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellow Dario Vásquez-Padilla who has been appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia where he will carry out teaching, research, extension, and academic-administrative activities. His fields of specialty include the racial state in Latin America, the sociology of race and racism, and historical reparations.
Scarlet and Black Digital Archivist Jesse Bayker appointed Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Rutgers–Camden
Congratulations to Scarlet and Black Digital Archivist Jesse Bayker on his new position as Assistant Teaching Professor of History at Rutgers University–Camden! Jesse is also an affiliated faculty member with the Digital Studies Center (DiSC), where he will continue building on the digital humanities and oral history work in developing the New Jersey Slavery Records database that he began while affiliated with the Scarlet and Black project at ISGRJ-New Brunswick.
Evolving Dynamics of Higher Education Institutions and Their Cities (1980-2020)
Congratulations to ISGRJ Post Doctoral Fellow Michael Conteh for the publication of his article in the  latest issue of
Metropolitan Universities
journal (MUJ) published by the Coalition of Urban Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) Journal. Michael's research examines the significance of higher education institutions (HEIs) as anchors in their host cities and their community engagement strategies from 1980 to 2020.
Nichole Garcia Awarded Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence
Congratulations to Nichole Garcia, ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education on being one of the recipients of the Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence at the 2023–2024 Faculty Year-End Excellence Awards. The fellowship honors faculty members who have made truly outstanding contributions to teaching during their early years at Rutgers.
It’s hard to resist the pull of the ‘good old days,’ nostalgia researcher says—here’s why
Even when we aren’t looking for it, nostalgia finds us. But we’re inclined to seek it out too.  It’s a “mixed emotional experience, so when we’re nostalgic, we may experience a sense of loss and longing. But we also experience positive emotions such as happiness [and] gratitude,” according to Andrew Abeyta, assistant professor in the department of psychology at Rutgers-Camden and ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow. Read the full piece in CNBC.
Franklin Moreno receives Early Career Grant from the Society of Research in Child Development
Congratulations to former ISGRJ Postdoctoral Associate in Psychology Franklin Moreno for being awarded a 2024 Early Career Grant from the Society of Research in Child Development for his continued research and work examining youth emotional, cognitive, and behavioral development associated with community violence, including by law enforcement, in Honduras and the US.
Nichole Garcia wins 2024 Scholars of Color Early Career Contribution Award from the American Educational Research Association
Congratulations to ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow and GSE Assistant Professor Dr. Nichole Garcia on winning the 2024 Scholars of Color Early Career Contribution Award presented by the AERA! This award recognizes scholars who have made significant contributions to the understanding of issues that disproportionately affect minority populations, and minority scholars who have made a significant contribution to education research and development.
Is Guyana’s Oil a Blessing or a Curse? Gaiutra Bahadur for The NY Times
More than any single country, Guyana demonstrates the struggle between the consequences of climate change and the lure of the oil economy. For The New York Times, Gaiutra Bahadur (Associate Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Department of English at Rutgers-Newark and ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow), writes about oil in Guyana, but also about empire, migration and diasporas. Read it here.
Yalidy Matos awarded Russell Sage Visiting Scholars Fellowship
Congratulations to ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of Political Science, Yalidy Matos for being awarded a Russell Sage Visiting Scholars Fellowship.
Matos will explore the importance of racial identity and underlying racial ideologies in Latina/o politics.
Learn more about the program
here
In Excess of Decolonization: The Sovereignty of Childhood in
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Through a reading of one of the cases in
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune.
Read the newly published article by ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellow Hugo Bujon in Sage Journals'
Theory, Culture & Society.
White Violence and the Pornography of Miscegenation in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
"Dating back to its romanticization of the Southern Reconstruction in
Song of the South (Wilfred Jackson, 1946)
Walt Disney Pictures has routinely marginalized and erased racial difference through whitewashing and stereotyping the racial/ethnic Other as comedically idiotic, dangerous, uncivilized and foreign."
Read the article, published in December 2023, by ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow Frank Garcia, in Taylor & Francis' Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
"Have You Told Yourself, “I Love You,” Today?" | Diverse Issues In Higher Education
| By Nichole Margarita Garcia
How do we create a rest practice so that our body/mind/spirits reconnect, and we refuse grind culture in academia? For me, I start every day by speaking my self-affirmation of love into existence. It is a reminder that I am alive and one day I will die, but today is not the day. Today I REST. Today I do what I love which has nothing to do with academia. I will love myself so much into death for I am living. Read the opinion piece by ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow Nichole Garcia.
The Immigration Law Death Penalty: Aggravated Felonies, Deportation, and Resistance
Congratulations to ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Rutgers-Camden, Sarah Tosh on the release of her new book "The Immigration Law Death Penalty: Aggravated Felonies, Deportation, and Resistance."
Read an excerpt of the book published in
Inquest.com.
Image credit:
Mike Maguire
/Flickr
Reading with the colonial in the life of Shaykh Musa Kamara, a Muslim scholar-saint
Shaykh Musa Kamara was one of the most prolific authors of the understudied tradition of Arabic writing in West Africa. This article is the first to be written in English on the colonial-era Senegalese intellectual who wrote a monumental history, argued against jihad as a valid Islamic practice in modern times, and critiqued common forms of social power. Read the article by Wendell Marsh, Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies, sketches the beginning of a reception history of this singular figure.
Parenting Strengths and Distress among Black Mothers Reported to the Child Welfare System: The Role of Social Network Quality
Congratulations to ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow Abigail Williams-Butler on the publication of her study in
Social Service Review
. The study explores social networks and their influence on parental strengths and distress among 402 Black mothers reported to the child welfare system. The study finds supportive social networks are associated with higher parental resilience and parental emotional control, and lower parental distress.
Moral reasoning about gang violence in context: A comparative study with children and adolescents exposed to
maras
in Honduras and not exposed in Nicaragua
Congratulations to ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellow Franklin Moreno on the publishing of his dissertation data of child and adolescent moral development and reasoning about gang violence. The comparison of youth in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with youth in Managua, Nicaragua was published in Child Development on August 17. Franklin was also awarded a Researchers in the Global South Grant by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (
SPSSI)
for his work
Singing in the Midnight Hour: An Encounter with the Queen of Soul - Melanie Hill for The Village Voice today
"On the fifth anniversary of Aretha’s passing, August 16, I am reminded of the importance of music’s role in working toward social justice, for Aretha Franklin was the epitome of a sonic prophet who believed in bringing humanity together. I am also reminded of how powerfully unifying music is, and the magnitude of souls reached with one person’s response of “Yes” to a divine call." - ISGRJ Named Term Chair Melanie Hill remembers the Queen of Soul in The Village Voice.
Andrew Abeyta for Profectus Magazine | If You Believe: How Meaning Can Improve College Outcomes
The path to a college degree can be tough. Sometimes, students face difficulties that shake their confidence in themselves and their ability to succeed.
Read ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow Andrew Abeyta's new article in Profectus Magazine on the on the impact of finding meaning/purpose in a college education.
Writing Resilience: an interview with Véronique Tadjo by Hugo Bujon and Ninon Vessie
Congratulations to our Postdoctoral Fellow Hugo Bujon on the publication of his interview of writer, poet, novelist and Côte d'Ivoire painter Véronique Tadjo which was just published in
Francosphères
v.12.
Bujon's interview, conducted along with colleague Ninon Vessie, examines the notion of writing resilience in Tadjo’s work. Writing resilience is as much the description of the resilience process after a disaster as it is the potential resilience in the very act of writing.
Congratulations to Melanie Hill: Hurston/Wright Summer Fellow!
ISGRJ Named Term Chair Dr. Melanie Hill has been accepted as a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Summer Fellow with the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She will be participating in a weeklong series, exploring research methodologies through sociological and literary lenses of critique.
Pictured: Melanie Hill with
Lucy Anne Hurston
, the niece of beloved anthropologist and author, Zora Neale Hurston
Ethnopolitical Violence Exposure and Children's Aggression
Read this book chapter by ISGRJ Post Doc Franklin Moreno, published in the Handbook of Anger, Aggression, and Violence. The chapter uses a social-cognitive ecological framework to summarize quantitative research on ethnopolitical violence exposure during childhood and adolescence and its association with aggressive behavior, including studies from various ethnopolitical conflicts around the globe, and consideration of factors at different levels of the social-ecological model.
Protecting the Most Vulnerable: Policy Response and Eviction Filing Patterns During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Read the new article by Peter Hepburn, Early Career Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems, published in
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.
The article assesses the net efficacy of eviction moratoria and renter-supportive measures, analyzing changes in eviction filing patterns in 2020–2021 in thirty-one cities across the country.
The Fight to Make it Harder for Landlords to Evict their Tenants
In most US communities, renters have very little assurance of staying in their homes long term if they’d like to. Landlords can hike rents, evict tenants through court with little difficulty, or simply choose to not renew their lease. Read this Vox article featuring Peter Hepburn, ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems at Rutgers–Newark.
Stacy Hawkins, Andrew Abeyta and Kendra Boyd awarded Rutgers Camden Chancellor’s Awards for Diversity, Inclusion, and Civic Engagement
The Chancellor’s Awards for Diversity, Inclusion and Civic Engagement honor those who have achieved special distinction in these areas. These awards celebrate those who strive daily to foster understanding and learning, invest in building relationships across differences, offer new ways to promote equity and diversity and work to advance the communities of southern New Jersey and the region.
Karen Jaime's
The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida
/ Jaime Shearn Coan for
ASAP
Journal
Read Postdoctoral Fellow Jaime Coan's new publication in
ASAP
Journal
about Karen Jaime’s
The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida
which provides an investigation of the historical and ongoing presence of queer and trans of color artists as they shape an aesthetic grounded in the home-space of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Unmaking Asian Exceptionalism: On Violence and the Possibility of Solidarities in America.
Read this powerful piece by Early Career Faculty Fellow Gaiutra Bahadur for the Boston Review.  Bahadur shares her personal experiences, raised in the eye of anti-Indian violence in Jersey City in the 1980s. The essay considers Black-brown solidarities and deconstructs American exceptionalism and the model minority myth.
Photograph by Corky Lee
Omaris Zamora-García Awarded a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
Congratulations to Early Career Faculty Fellow Omaris Zamora-García for being awarded a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2023-2024!
Omaris and her Co-PI Keishla Rivera-Lopez (Princeton University) were also awarded a grant from the US Latino Digital Humanities Grants-in-Aid program to fund the initial research for their collaborative project, DominiRicanDH.
Jermaine Toney's paper "Is There Wealth Stability across Generations in the U.S.?: Evidence from Panel Study" profiled in
Marketplace
“There’s a very strong connection between intergenerational networks and asset-building wealth — including homeownership. Generational wealth matters,” Toney said. “A substantial portion of grandparents with the lowest proportions of wealth are likely to have grandchildren who possess low levels of wealth.” Read the feature in
Marketplace
here
Eun-Jin Keish Kim on "Feminist Freedom Warriors"
Watch ISGRJ Post Doctoral Fellow Eun-Jin Keish Kim in conversation with Dr. Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Dr. Linda Carty on the latest edition of
Feminist Freedom Warriors (FFW)
, a digital video archive documenting cross-generational conversations about justice, politics and hope with feminist scholar-activists.
Shareholder Schools: Racial Capitalism, Policy Borrowing, and Marketized Education Reform in Cape Town, South Africa
Congratulations to ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Education Amelia Herbert on the the first publication of her dissertation in
Comparative Education Review
's special issue on "Black Lives Matter and Global Struggles for Racial Justice in Education."
Dr. Melanie Hill Performs at Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock Election Celebration
Our Institute Named Term Chair Dr. Melanie Hill was recently invited to perform for U.S. Senator Reverend Dr. Raphael Warnock's Election Night celebration on Tuesday, December 6th in Atlanta. She also toured the state of Georgia with her Gospel Soul Violin to inform individuals of their voting power through Gospel and Soul music. To add to these remarkable feats, she had a chance to share the music stage and perform spontaneously, gospel soul free styling, with DJ D-Nice.
Peter Hepburn Awarded Grants from NIH and HUD to Study Links Between Eviction and Mortality and Pandemic-era Emergency Rental Assistance Program
Congratulations to Early Career Faculty Fellow Peter Hepburn for being awarded a $1.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to evaluate the effects of pandemic eviction-prevention policies on individual and community mortality.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) also just awarded Professor Hepburn and his colleagues at Princeton $500,000 to carry out a two-year study evaluating the impact of the pandemic-era Emergency Rental Assistance program.
Diversity of the Mind: Andrew Abeyta's Research Explores How Underrepresented Students Find Community and Purpose
As Hispanic Heritage Month draws to a close, see how Rutgers-Camden psychologist and ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellow Andrew Abeyta is helping minority and first-generation students derive meaning and social belonging from the university experience.
Intersectionality and structural gendered racism: Theoretical considerations for Black women, children, and families impacted by child protective services in the United States
This critical review by Abigail Williams-Butler uses the frameworks of intersectionality and structural
gendered racism to understand the racialized, gendered, and class-based oppression regarding the overrepresentation of poor Black women, children, and families within child protective services (CPS) in the United States. The article presents a detailed overview of how structural gendered racism is manifested within CPS practices and policies.
Read Jermaine Toney's Recent Journal Articles on The Racial Wealth Gap
“Is There Wealth Stability Across Generations in the U.S.? Evidence from Panel Study, 1984-2017.” (July, 2022)
“Economic Insecurity in the Family Tree and the Racial Wealth Gap.” (June, 2022)
“Intergenerational Economic Mobility and the Racial Wealth Gap.” (May, 2021)
Omaris Zamora's
Transnational Renderings of Negro/a/x/*: Re-centering Blackness in AfroLatinidad
published in
Small Axe
68
Congratulations to Omariz Zamora on the publication of her latest peer-reviewed essay in
Small Axe
68,
"Transnational Renderings of Negro/a/x/*: Re-centering Blackness in AfroLatinidad."
Her
op-ed
Hispanic Heritage Month: The importance of Afro-Latinx identity in the diaspora" was also recently featured on NJ.com.
Accolades for Naomi Jackson
We congratulate Naomi Jackson who recently concluded her 2021-22 Scholar-In-Residence Fellowship Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She also received a Junior Faculty COVID grant and a Freya Project grant for her novel-in-progress,
Behind God’s Back
. Her essay, “Her Kind: on losing and finding my mind”, was published in Harper's in November 2021 and will appear in
The Best American Essays 2022
this November.
Latinidad in Black and White: How Latino Politics (Dis)Avow America's Racial Hierarchy
Congratulations to Yalidy Matos for being awarded a Russell Sage Foundation grant! Matos will examine how U.S. Latinos have aligned with and/or complicated the color line in the U.S. and the political consequences of such alignment. She was also just awarded the 2022 Distinguished Junior Scholar Award from the American Political Science Association.
Congratulations to Brandon Williams on his recent accomplishments:
The Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence Award, the publication of his book
Choral Reflections: Insights from American Choral Conductor-Teachers
, the presentation of his paper which he coauthored,
"Standing in the Gap: Middle Level Music Learning in the U.S. and its Territories,"
at the 2022 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, and his commissioning by the Children's Chorus of Washington to compose a new work celebrating Tubman's legacy.
Yesenia Barragán wins the LASA 2022 Best Book Prize for
Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific.
The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the largest professional association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America. With over 13,000 members, over 60% of whom reside outside the United States, LASA is the one association that brings together experts on Latin America from all disciplines and diverse occupational endeavors, across the globe.
The book also received Honorable Mention for the Michael Jiménez Prize from the Colombia Section of LASA.
Omaris Zamora-García
We are happy to announce the publication of Early Career Faculty Fellow Omaris Z. Zamora-García's article
"Before Bodak Yellow and Beyond the Post-Soul: Cardi B Performs AfroLatina Feminisms in the Trance,"
published in The Black Scholar Journal of Black Studies and Research.
Image credit: Cardi B at Vogue Taiwan (Wiki Commons)
We commend Gaiutra Bahadur on her two-part narrative,
The Prakash Churaman Story
The two-part piece profiles
Prakash Churaman
, an immigrant teen from Queens -- arrested at the age of fifteen, interrogated without an attorney present, wrongfully incarcerated for six years -- and his campaign to be exonerated.
Abigail Williams-Butler's "Racialized Gender Differences in Mental Health Service Use, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and recidivism among justice-involved African American Youth"
We are happy to announce the publication Abigail Williams-Butler's article as first author (with Liu, F., Howell, T., Menon, S. E., & Quinn, C. R.) on
"Racialized Gender Differences in Mental Health Service Use, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and recidivism among justice-involved African American Youth,"
in
Race & Social Problems.
Image credit: Mark Harris/ProPublica
Congratulations to Jessica Calvanico and Yesenia Barragan!
We are proud to congratulate Jessica Calvanico on the publication of her article, “Arson Girls, Match-Strikers, and Firestarters” in the most recent issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Yesenia Barragan for receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities 2022 grant for her project, “A Country of Their Own: African Americans and the Promise of Antebellum Latin America."
Watershed
Performed by Rutgers Voorhees Choir
Enjoy Brandon Williams’ direction of the Rutgers Voorhees Choir performing in the Cow Tunnel under U.S. Route 1 on the Rutgers–New Brunswick campus. Williams led the choir in a performance of
Watershed,
a sound installation for vocal ensemble composed by music professor Scott Ordway, which premiered at the ISGRJ'S first public event of the fall 2021 semester, the March2RUGardens.
Accolades for Baba Badji and Kendra Boyd
We congratulate Baba Badji for making the National Book Awards long list with his
Ghost Letters
, and Kendra Boyd for her article,
“A ‘Body of Business Makers’: The Detroit Housewives League, Black Women Entrepreneurs, and the Rise of Detroit’s African American Business Community,”
recipient of the Association of Black Women Historians 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Article Prize.
Race, Labor and Public Policy Fellows
The Institute is pleased to introduce its new
Race, Labor and Public Policy Fellowship
focused specifically on the relationship between, and translation of, research and public policy writing and activism.
Congratulations to our first two fellows,
James Jones
(Africana Studies, School of Arts and Sciences, Newark) and
Sheri Davis Faulkner
(School of Management and Labor Relations, New Brunswick), who will be planning and leading a series of activities for the program — including public events and workshops around books that demonstrate the blend of scholarly, humanities-based approaches, public policy writing and research projects with undergraduates in this area.
New Book Publications
New Book Publications
Featuring new publications from a rich array of scholars from multiple humanistic disciplines across Rutgers—from law to language, from philosophy to art, from history to gender studies, from sociology to health—who are committed to the study of race and related systems of inequity. We showcase the depth and breadth of their research and writing, as we work collaboratively towards the vision of a more just and equitable world.
Dust That Never Settles: Literary Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War
(Stanford U. Press, June 10, 2025)
Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century.
It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of people dead.
Colored Women Sittin' on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music by Melanie Hill
(Univ. of North Carolina Press, April 29, 2025)
From blue-note turmoil to grace-note power, Black women preachers stand tall. In Colored Women Sittin' on High, Melanie R. Hill offers a new perspective on the art of the sermon in African American literature, music, and theology. Drawing on the womanist cadence of Alice Walker in literature and the rhythmical flow of named womanist theologians, Hill makes interventions at the intersections of African American literary criticism, music, and religious studies.
The Immigration Law Death Penalty: Aggravated Felonies, Deportation, and Legal Resistance by Sarah Tosh
(NYU Press, October 10, 2023)
In immigration courts across America, a non-citizen convicted of an “aggravated felony” will almost certainly face deportation with no access to asylum. The term encompasses more than thirty offenses, ranging from check fraud and shoplifting to filing a false tax return. This book chronicles the rise of the use of the aggravated felony, known by lawyers as the “immigration law death penalty,” to criminalize and then deport immigrants.
Freedom Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship and Racial Capitalism in Detroit by Kendra Boyd
(Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, April 8, 2025)
The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit’s status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story.
Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream, by Enobong "Anna" Branch and Caroline Hanley
(Russell Sage Foundation, December 15, 2022)
The ability to achieve economic security through hard work is a central tenet of the American Dream, but significant shifts in today’s economy have fractured this connection. In Work in Black and White, sociologists Enobong "Anna" Branch and Caroline Hanley draw on interviews with 80 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told about the American Dream – and about who should have access to it and who should not.
Spectral Evidence: Poems by Gregory Pardlo
(Knopf, January 30, 2024)
A powerful mediation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic
Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—this is the author's first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest. Pardlo ponders the development of his own identity and sense of self as it was shaped against the glaring forces of whiteness.
Clicas: Gender, Sexuality, and Struggle in Latina/o/x Gang Literature and Film by Frank Garcia
(University of Texas Press, August 13, 2024)
Clicas
examines Latina/o/x literature and film by and/or about gay and women gang members. Through close readings of literature and film, Frank García reimagines the typical narratives describing gang membership and culture, amplifying and complicating critical gang studies in the social sciences and humanities and looking at gangs across racial, ethnic, and national identities.
Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime by Anthony Grasso
(Univ of Chicago Press, September 17, 2024)
While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at an unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. By examining the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Anthony Grasso shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins
Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place, by J.T. Roane
(NYU Press, January 3, 2023)
A history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from the Great Migration to the era of Black Power.
In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods.
Sacred Spells: Collected Works by Assotto Saint (Author), Introduction by Jaime Coan
(Nightboat Books, August 29, 2023)
The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.
In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death.
Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics by Yalidy Matos
(Oxford University Press, May 9, 2023)
Immigration has been at the heart of US politics for centuries. In Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics, Yalidy Matos examines the inherent moral, value-based, nature of white Americans' immigration attitudes, including preferences on local immigration enforcement programs, federal immigration policy, and levels of legal immigration allowed. Does identifying as white always signify a commitment to maintain the racial status quo or can it result in commitments to racial justice?
Turn the World Upside Down: Empire and Unruly Forms of Black Folk Culture in the U.S. and Caribbean
(Columbia University Press, July 4, 2023)
In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.”  Imani D. Owens recasts Black creators’ relationship to folk culture, emphasizing their formal and stylistic innovations.
Asian America Rising: New Directions for Political Activism
(NYU Press, September 16, 2025)
A collection of movement flashpoints and insurgent visions for Asian American activism.
In media and electoral politics, Asian Americans are celebrated as the fastest-growing racial demographic in the United States and claimed as evidence of racial progress. Yet the “rise” of Asian America rarely centers the coordinated forms of grassroots political organizing that Asian Americans have used to shape their place in society.
Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future) by Wendell Marsh
(Columbia University Press, October 14, 2025)
Textual Life is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.
The Last Plantation: Racism and Resistance in the Halls of Congress by James Jones
(Princeton University Press, May 21, 2024)
Racism continues to infuse Congress’s daily practice of lawmaking and shape who obtains congressional employment. In this timely and provocative book, James Jones reveals how and why many who work in Congress call it the “Last Plantation.” He shows that even as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s and antidiscrimination laws were implemented across the nation, Congress remained exempt from federal workplace protections for decades.
Bread and Circus by Airea D. Matthews
(Scribner, May 30, 2023)
A powerful collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class and its failures for those rendered invisible by it.
Bread and Circus
demonstrates that self-interest fails when people become commodities themselves, and shows how the most vulnerable—including the author and her family—have been impacted by that failure.
The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems, by Patrick Rosal
(Persea, September 21, 2021)
For nearly two decades, Patrick Rosal has been one of the most beloved and admired poets in the United States, bringing together the most dynamic aspects of literary and performance poetry. The son of Filipino immigrants (his father was a lapsed Catholic priest), he has made a life of bridging worlds―literary, ethnic, national, spiritual―through his poetry, and has been recognized with some of the highest honors and countless devoted readers.
Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance, by Belinda Edmondson
(Oxford University Press, May 3, 2022)
Creole Noise is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean, from the late eighteenth century to the early 19th century. By emphasizing multiracial origins, transnational influences, and musical performance alongside often violent historical events of the nineteenth century, it revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern, 20th century phenomenon, associated with regional anti-colonial or black-affirming nationalist projects.
Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, A Novel by Akil Kumarasamy
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 23, 2022)
In the near future, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students―living through a drought and at the edge of the war―as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator’s life and the manuscript begin to become entangled.
Choral Reflections: Insights from American Choral Conductor-Teachers, by Brandon Williams
(Hal Leonard, January 1, 2022)
Choral Reflections offers inspiration, ideas, and insights for conductor-teachers at any stage. The goal for Choral Reflections is to provide a platform for a new and more representative cross-section of American choral conductor-teachers to share their resflections, beliefs, values, and visions for the choral art.
Dignity-Affirming Education: Cultivating the Somebodiness of Students and Educators, by Decoteau J. Irby, Charity Anderson, Charles M. Payne
(Teachers College Press, May 13, 2022)
The word “dignity” is not typically used in education, yet it is at the core of strong pedagogy. By bringing together a collection of chapters written by authors with wide-ranging expertise, this volume presents a powerful approach to education that reminds people of their
somebodiness
—the premise that each person inherently possesses the intellectual acumen and creative resources to pursue development on their own terms.
Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific, by Yesenia Barragan
(Cambridge University Press, July 1, 2021)
Freedom's Captives is a compelling exploration of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Pacific coast of Colombia, the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by people of African descent. .
Ghost Letters, by Baba Badji
(Parlor Press, January 1, 2021)
Ghost Letters creates a ghost mother who becomes a presiding presence in Baba Badji’s first collection of poems. His poetry explores what it means to be Senegalese, American, and Black, as well as the bonds of Black people across the Black diaspora.
Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur
(Univ. of Chicago Press, August 4, 2014)
In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a "coolie"―the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. In Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her.
ISGRJ Fellowship Programs and Named Term Chairs
ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellows Program
Chancellors, deans, and the ISGRJ executive director, in consultation with department chairs, nominate promising scholars working in the areas of social justice and racial inequality for a one-year fellowship at the institute. Fellows receive partial support toward a course release, $2,500 in research funds, and access to institute-funded events throughout Rutgers and benefit from mentoring and professional development.
ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellows Program
These humanities-centered fellowships support recent doctoral recipients whose research demonstrates a deep investment in the areas of inquiry related to anti-racism and social inequality.
Scarlet and Black Postdoctoral Fellowships
These fellowships support scholars engaged in the examination of the global dimensions of anti-Black racism and its impact on the Americas (1580 to the present).
ISGRJ Named Term Chairs
Named term chairs support the most promising assistant and associate professors working in the areas of social justice and racial inequality. Nominated by deans and department chairs and funded for five years by the Mellon Foundation, these faculty receive a summer salary, travel and research funding, and access to institute-funded events.
The Mentorship Mosaic Program
An array of opportunities supporting a culture of mentorship and building communities of care.
Learn More about The Mentorship Mosaic Program here
Rutgers Research Council Awards
About the Program
The Research Council Awards program offers six annual award opportunities to support faculty research and especially to encourage scholarship tackling challenging disciplinary problems in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts. The council has proudly been providing internal awards to the Rutgers faculty for the past
80 consecutive years.
The
Individual Fulcrum Awards
is tailored to individual researchers and those in the creative arts who are testing out new ideas to accelerate their scientific inquiry, program of research and scholarship, or creative production.
The
Social and Racial Justice Awards
supports academic research on racial and social justice in all domains of intellectual, social, artistic, and environmental life.
The
Collaborative
Multidisciplinary Awards
offers the opportunity for a group of faculty members across disciplines to work together on a new, shared problem or line of research.
The
Subvention Awards for the Publication of Scholarly Books
provides partial subsidies to university and other highly regarded scholarly presses to cover a portion of the cost of publishing a scholarly book.
The
Manuscript Review Awards
helps faculty members publish authoritative, thought-provoking, field-changing books.
The
Climate Action Awards,
new for the 2022 funding cycle, is designed to support faculty whose work addresses the global climate crisis and its solutions at a variety of scales.
Learn More about The Research Council Awards