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.
Juan Arredondo
Visual Journalism, Documentary Filmmaking, Migration
Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, Journalism, RU-NWK
Juan Arredondo is a Colombian American documentary photographer who has chronicled human rights and conflict in Colombia, Venezuela, and Central America. He’s a regular contributor to The New York Times and National Geographic. His photographs have also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, ESPN Magazine, Vanity Fair, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and others. Since 2014, he has been reporting on the use of child soldiers by illegal armed groups in Colombia, the peace agreement between the Colombian Government and FARC, and most recently, the demobilization and reintegration of formers fighters into the Colombian society, for which he was awarded a World Press Photo award in 2018. For his work as a journalist, he was also awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 2018-2019, an Overseas Press Club Scholar Award, an ICRC Humanitarian Visa D’Or Award, a Getty Grant for Editorial Photography, a Getty Images Emerging Talent Award, and a Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award.
Eun-Jin Keish Kim
American Studies
Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, English, RU-NWK
Eun-Jin Keish Kim studies immigration, diaspora, and feminist (dis)abilities focusing on queer and undocumented im/migration. She approaches history and literature through a transnational and multidisciplinary lens. Her work emphasizes social justice, women of color feminism, and undocuqueer episteme. Dr. Kim is committed to undocumented im/migrant communities and first-generation students of color. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Harvard University with secondary fields in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and Latinx Studies.
Teona Williams
Black Geographies
Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, Geography, RU-NB
Teona Williams' work revolves around Black Geographies, 20th century African American and environmental history, and Black feminist theory. Her current work explores the role of disaster and hunger, in shaping Black feminist ecologies from 1930-1990s. Specifically, she follows a cadre of rural Black feminists who articulated visions of food sovereignty, overhauled antiblack disaster relief, and vigorously fought for universal basic income, radical land reform, and food and clean water access as a human right. Prior to Rutgers, she received her doctoral degree at Yale University in the departments of African American Studies and History. She also completed a master's degree in environmental justice at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
Christina Knight
Visual Studies, African American Studies, Performance Studies
Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, Art History, RU-NB
Christina Knight's work examines the connection between embodied practices and identity, the relationship between race and the visual field, and the queer imaginary. She is currently at work on a manuscript, The Ship That is the Body: the Middle Passage in Time-Based Art, 1986-1994, which investigates contemporary black American performing and visual arts that reimagine the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Focusing on time-based art, the manuscript highlights practices that reframe how audiences understand themselves as historical actors, alerting them to the ways that they co-create the meaning of both black (art) objects and black subjects. She received her Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University.
Melanie R. Hill
English Literature, Music, Theology, American Studies
Violinist
Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, English, RU-NWK
Melanie R. Hill’s transdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections of literature, music, and theology, covering such topics as Black feminism, womanist thought, and the element of the sermon in African American literature. Dr. Hill is a reviewer for the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. She has written articles on black feminism and the sermon as sonic art in James Baldwin’s "The Amen Corner", as well as Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald under the Religions Journal and Oxford University Press, respectively.
Dr. Hill's new book, Colored Women Sittin’ on High: Womanist Sermonic Practice in Literature and Music (University of North Carolina Press, April 29, 2025) focuses on the ways in which Black women preachers in African American literature, music, and in the space of the pulpit counter social injustices through sermon and song. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania with graduate certificates in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
In addition to her scholarship, Dr. Hill is a Gospel Soul violinist who has performed at the White House on two occasions under the Obama administration, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Apollo Theater in New York, the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and for Pope Francis's Papal Mass during his historic visit to the United States.
Melissa Valle
Departments of Sociology/Anthropology and Africana Studies, Global Urban Studies/ Urban Systems
Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, RU-NWK
Melissa Valle’s ethnographic research explores how people determine who is worthy of occupying contested space in a gentrifying neighborhood in Cartagena, Colombia, demonstrating how race, ethnicity, gender, and class are encoded in the value of urban spaces through analyses of micro-level meaning-making practices and structures.. Her book project, Battling for Worth: Race, Recognition and Urban Change on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, is under contract with Oxford University Press (Global and Comparative Ethnography Series). She earned her PhD in Sociology from Columbia University.
J.T. Roane
Black Geographies
Mellon Assistant Professor of Global Racial Justice, Africana Studies and Geography, RU-NB
J. T. Roane, a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, is a historian broadly concerned with matters of geography, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on the manuscript, Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia, which historicizes multiple modes of insurgent spatial assemblage Black communities articulated in Philadelphia in the second half of the twentieth century. He is the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative and former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). He received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University.
