Research Area Spotlight: Africana Studies

Hyacinth Miller is a political scientist whose interdisciplinary research centers on Black women in politics, Caribbean and African political development, and Black immigrant political incorporation.

Hyacinth directs the Public Service Leadership Program at the Sheila Y. Oliver Center for Politics and Race in America and is a co-founder of the Rutgers University Atlantic Reparatory Justice Research Lab. Her extensive professional background includes roles in government affairs, criminal justice reform, and development, with experience at the JEHT Foundation, the Association for Paroling Authorities International, New York City Council and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Hyacinth was also the co-organizer for the two-day seminar on Racial Justice, Reparations, and the University on February 5 and 6, 2025, as part of the 2024-2025 Sawyer Seminar at Rutgers-Newark titled Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures. The events in the seminar have brought together scholars, students, and community organizers to reflect on four interconnected themes of disability justice, transitional justice, environmental justice, and racial justice with the aim of illuminating common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms. Each area of focus reflects not only the scholarly interests of our faculty and students, but also the institutional commitments of Rutgers University – Newark as an anchor institution devoting its resources to serve our community.

Current Research:

Miller's interests include Black women in elected office, domestically and internationally, with an emphasis on candidate emergence and campaign strategy. Her current research project, tentatively titled The Garden State's Black Politics, examines Black women in elected office in New Jersey. A second, nascent research project concerns 21st-century calls for reparations and repair and the political and legal responses to these calls.

Publications:

• Miller, Hyacinth. (2018). “Black, Foreign-Born and Elected: West Indians in New Jersey’s Political Offices.” National Political Science Review, 19(1), 79-96.

Media Appearances/Speaking Engagements:

• "Local Black Female Leaders Unpack Politics, Leadership, and Forging Their Own Paths," Tap Into Newark. Miller served as moderator for the “Fireside Chat: An Intimate Conversation about Politics, Leadership, and Forging Your Own Path” with US Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, NJ Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter, and Essex County Commissioner A’Dorian Murray-Thomas event presented by the Rutgers Center for Politics and Race in America (CPRA)  and Shiela Y. Oliver Civic Association at Rutgers-Newark. Nicole Zanchelli (February 2025).

• “Did unconscious racial bias contribute to Harris’ defeat?” NJ Spotlight News, Brianna Vannozzi (November 7, 2024)

• “Race, Gender, Haitian immigrants” Live Election Night Coverage, Bridging Philly, KYW Newsradio 103.9 FM, Racquel Williams (November 5, 2024)

• “Rutgers-Newark Expert on Black Women Leaders Weighs in on Presidential Debate” Rutgers University - Newark, Faculty Excellence Profile (September 11, 2024)

How Do Social and Racial Justice Concerns Appear in Your Work?

Through my research, I attempt to center and amplify Black women's political voices. I also seek to platform the contributions of Caribbean and African descended people in the Diaspora. Lastly, using a critical lens, I seek to unpack and deconstruct the colonial mechanisms that have lead to the call for reparative justices.

ISGRJ feature: Just Takes

On November 5^th, 2024, the world waited with collective bated breath to see if, at long last, United States citizens would…could…elect an accomplished, competent, relatively young, joyous Jamerican Desi woman as president. The answer was no.

Political wonks have shared their post-election analyses about why Vice President Harris may have lost the nomination [including me]. The critiques include an elitist message,  a platform that inadequately addressed the economy and immigration--the two most salient issues to American voters--, and that she did not do enough in her 107-day campaign [which raised a historic one billion dollars] to convince voters to trust her vision. Collecting and properly dissecting the November electoral data will take some time. Still, 92% of Black women voted for Vice President Harris to become the 47^th president of the United States – 92% out of 100%. It would be an understatement to say that many Black women voters are flummoxed, angry, exhausted, and crestfallen. As a result, many of us have decided to take some time to focus on self-care and community.

Despite the Harris outcome, Black women are still winning.

Read the full piece by Hyacinth here.

Omaris Z. Zamora is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar and spoken-word poet. Her research interests include: theorizing AfroLatinidad in the context of race, gender, sexuality through Afro-diasporic approaches.

Her current book project tentatively titled, Cigüapa Unbound: AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation examines the transnational Black Dominican narratives put forth in the work of Firelei Baez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Nelly Rosario, Ana Lara, Loida Maritza Pérez, Josefina Baez, Cardi B, and La Bella Chanel. Zamora pays close attention to how they embody their blackness, produce knowledge, and shift the geographies of black feminism in ways that recognize the legacies of Chicana/Latina and Black American feminist theory in the United States, but tends to the specific experiences of AfroLatina women and their multiple genealogies. The manuscript proposes “tranceformation” as a continuous process that engages with the spiritual aspect of self-making and centers the body as an archive that creates and transmits an AfroLatina feminist epistemological theory.

Her work has been published in Post45, Latinx Talk, Label Me Latina/o, among others and has been featured on NPR’s Alt.Latino podcast. She fuses her poetry with her scholarly work as a way of contributing to a black poetic approach to literature and cultural studies.

She earned her Master of Arts in African and African Diasporas and Ph.D. in Iberian and Latin American literatures and cultures at the University of Texas, Austin. 

Research Highlight: 

In 2025, The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice awarded Professor Omaris Z. Zamora and Keishla Rivera-Lopez (Research Associate at The Center For Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College) a research grant for their project DominiRicanDH.

DominiRicanDH is a digital humanities project that tells a story that is often invisibilized–the
tensions, solidarities, and re-imaginings of these inter-Caribbean diasporic communities through forming an archive of music, art, performance, and activism that highlights the diasporic Dominican and Puerto Rican, as well as DominiRican diaspora communities in the U.S. Hence, much of the historical and cultural archive pertinent to this project must be highlighted through a conceptual framework that tends to 20th century U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the narratives of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and xenophobia from the Trujillo dictatorship to anti-Blackness in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

Zamora and Rivera-Lopez are interested in tracing the ways that contact zones between and created by Puerto Rican and Dominican diaspora communities together create archives that tell the story of the relationship between these communities. The project aims to tell a story that is often invisibilized–the tensions, solidarities, and re-imaginings of these inter-Caribbean diasporic communities through forming an archive of music, art, performance, and activism that highlights the diasporic Dominican and Puerto Rican, as well as DominiRican diaspora communities in the U.S. The goal is that DominiRicanDH becomes a generative space for scholars, artists, activists and students to share their work through our hub and/or programming aimed at being in dialogue with the communities it intends to reach.

How Do Social and Racial Justice Concerns Appear in Your Work?

Social and racial justice is at the center of my work, which pertains to Black transnational freedoms by Black women in the African diaspora. My work pays special attention to the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the transnational context in the Americas, particularly the Spanish-speaking Caribbean via cultural production.

Learn more about Omaris here.

Keith Michael Green is a proud alumnus of Camden High, and his research and teaching interests center people of African descent in speculative fiction, captivity narratives, disability studies, and multilingualism. His first book, Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage: 1816-1861 (Alabama, 2015), explored neglected forms of captivity blacks experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century. He also co-edited a collection of essays on bondage and subjection in the contemporary moment, entitled Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge, 2019). His current projects explore the meanings of Cuba for blacks in the United States, multilingual African American literary production, as well as the married and religious life of two enslaved persons in colonial New England, Hannah Hovey and Briton Hammon. 

Research and Teaching Interests

African American literature, Afro-Cuban culture, 19th-century American literature, autobiography, narratives of black captivity, speculative fiction and disability studies

Selected Publications

Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage: 1816–1861 (University of Alabama Press, 2015, recipient of the Elizabeth Agee Prize for “outstanding scholarship in the field of American literary studies”) and co-editor with Sarada Balagopalan and Cati Coe of Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge, 2019)

ISGRJ Project

Research on Black Transnationalism & Amistad Conversations, a series of cross-campus conversations assessing the viability of formalizing a Rutgers University affiliation with the historic Amistad Commission, whose efforts under Stephanie J. Harris will ensure the teaching of Black history in New Jersey schools

Research highlights

Saved But Enslaved: Exploring Black and Indigenous Roots in Plymouth’s First Church

In 1620, in the seaside town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Pilgrims founded what came to be known as the First Parish Church of Plymouth. A grant-funded Rutgers University–Camden study is unveiling the untold history of Black and Indigenous membership in Plymouth’s first church through the accounts of two enslaved, married congregants: Hannah Hovey and Briton Hammon. The study is part of a larger book project, Plymouth’s Paradox: Christianity and Bondage in the Church Founded by the Pilgrims, 1708-1793.

Click here to read the article about Keith's Rutgers University Academic Affairs Research Council Grant for his project “Saved but Enslaved: Briton Hammon, Hannah Hovey, and the Earliest Black and Indigenous Members of Plymouth’s First Church, 1708-1783.” The two-year project will contribute to scholarship that shows the ways slavery and Christianity were codependent in colonial New England. Using municipal, estate, and church records, Green will produce an unprecedented recording of Black and Indigenous membership in the Pilgrims’ founding American church.