What We Do 

Congratulations to our Founding and Executive Director Michelle Stephens for being honored with the Rutgers Global Health Institute's Champion in Global Health Award for 2024! 

The Champion in Global Health is awarded to extraordinary leaders in our global fight for health equity who have made a significant difference in addressing health inequity here in NJ and around the world.

Led by ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado and co-organized by Lauren Shallish (Urban Education), the Sawyer Seminar series, Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures, will explore themes of social justice centering on four critical areas of inquiry: systemic racism, environmental crisis and climate change, disability, human displacement and post-conflict resolution.

ISGRJ-Camden Director Patrick Rosal's poem Yes It Will Rain (or Prayer for Our First Home) is featured in today's Poets.org Poem-a-Day! Poets.org is produced by the Academy of American Poets, the nation’s leading champion of American poets and poetry, with members in all fifty states. Its mission is to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry.

Congratulations to ISGRJ-Camden Codirector Greg Pardlo for being awarded the University of West Georgia’s Blackwell Prize! A series that celebrates high achievement in writing and observational painting, The Blackwell Prize in Writing awards stellar authors each year and invites them to campus for readings and community engagement. Pardlo will read works spanning his career among other public readings and his time in Atlanta will also include a stay at the Newnan Art Residency.

We're thrilled to share the news that our Co-Director of our Institute Campus branch at Rutgers-Camden, Patrick Rosal has been named the Lamont Winter Poet at Exeter Academy in January, 2024! Rosa, will be joining a distinguished list of writers that began forty years ago with Borges and has grown to include the likes of WS Merwin, Natasha Trethewey, Derek Walcott, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Patricia Smith, Afaa Weaver, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Alexander and many more.

We're pleased to announce that Dr. Carlos Ulises Decena has been appointed Acting ISGRJ Director during 2024! Carlos is the current Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life leading our Office of Undergraduate Intellectual Life and Fellows in Racial Justice Learning Community. He is also Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. 

As he was working on his new anthology of poetry, Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo reflected on race relations in the United States and the power of Black storytelling. Read his faculty highlight in Rutgers Today. 

Our ISGRJ-Camden Codirector, and the author of “Spectral Evidence” Takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire. Gregory Pardlo’s poetry collection Spectral Evidence became available on January 30, 2024 from Knopf, and he sat down with Lit Hub to answer few questions about his readers, when he writes, and his favorite book to recommend to others. (Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Congratulations to ISGRJ-Camden Codirector Gregory Pardlo on the publication of his newest poetry anthology “Spectral Evidence,” (Knopf, 1/30/24), and his poem "Dragonflies," which was featured in the print edition of the January 22, 2024 issue of The New Yorker Magazine. The anthology has received glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly and other outlets. His Giornata 4 was also published in Poem-a-Day on January 11, by the Academy of American Poets. 

Congratulations to our Institute Campus Director at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Candace Buford on their newly published vibrant biography of Susie King Taylor, one of the first Black Civil War nurses, in a new series spotlighting Black women who left their mark on history, as part of a new children's series spotlighting Black women who left their mark on history.

Tune into season 2 of HBO’s The Gilded Age on October 29 on the HBO streaming platform, Max.

As the show’s co-executive producer, Rutgers historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar ensures the authenticity of its depiction of Black characters.

Erica is also our Institute campus branch Director at Rutgers-New Brunswick. 
 

Read Greg Pardlo's poem Theater Selfie, originally published in the September 18, 2023 issue of The Yale Review.

Pardlo is Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University and visiting faculty at New York University Abu Dhabi. His poetry collection Spectral Evidence is forthcoming in 2024.

Read this feature on our founding and executive director by the Rutgers Global Health Institute, in which she examines the connections between structural racism and health outcomes through Black Bodies Black Health, a signature project of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.

“One day, you will learn,” the woman said, “inshallah.” She was talking about the language, but to me her words prophesied a more transcendent lesson. 

Read the essay by ISGRJ-Camden Co-Director Gregory Pardlo published in the current issue of ADI Magazine. 

Congratulations to our ISGRJ-Newark Director Mayte Green-Mercado who was just awarded a Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) multi-country research grant to conduct research in Tunisia and Algeria.

The fellowship supports advanced research in the humanities, social sciences, and allied natural sciences and enables US scholars to carry out trans-regional and comparative research in countries across the network of Overseas Research Centers as well as other countries.

Congratulations to our ISGRJ Camden Co-Director Patrick Rosal for being Distinguished Visiting Humanities Lecturer at Friends' Central School on March 20!

The Friends' Central School's Distinguished Lecture Series seeks to inspire the next generation of writers, educators, scientists, researchers, policy makers, and thinkers by bringing renowned scholars to campus for courses and a public lecture.

The ISGRJ Founding and Executive Director is highlighted as one of the researchers from across the university who are making an impact on the university and their field of study. She is recognized as not just a leader in her field, but also the embodiment of the notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion that the university and the Office for Research strive to uphold. 

Gregory Pardlo contextualizes James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones for the contemporary era in his introduction in the newly published edition of the Harlem Renaissance classic: seven inspirational poems inspired by the powerful rhetorical traditions of African-American sermons and spirituals, featured in LitHub here. 

Professionals and practitioners from around the university were invited to share their experiences as Black professionals: the highs, lows, most impactful lessons and their advice to the next generation. 

The new Everyman's Library edition of James Weldon Johnson's "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man," has just been released (November 1, 2022), and includes an introduction by ISGRJ-Camden Codirector Gregory Pardlo. First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards—and double consciousness—experienced by Black people in modern America. 

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world." Each volume presents a selection of the year’s most brilliant, striking, and innovative poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. For The Best American Poetry 2022 guest editor Matthew Zapruder, whose own poems are “for everyone, everywhere...democratic in insights and feelings", has selected the seventy-five new poems that represent American poetry today at its most dynamic.

Green-Mercado is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Minor in the History Department. She is also Founder and Co-Director of the Mediterranean Displacements Project.

Her courses deal with questions of religion, politics, identity, and race and ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods.

Boddie is a nationally recognized scholar on dismantling systemic racism whose work bridges diverse disciplines and practices of scholarship, teaching, community, and service and is widely cited and discussed in both academic and non-academic circles. Her scholarship explores the regulation and production of race in spatial contexts and dynamic systems that perpetuate racial inequality.  She departed Rutgers at the end of summer 2022 and has joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty .

The new PBS documentary which premieres on October 4, 2022 offers fresh perspectives and insights into the inspiring woman who repeatedly risked her own life and freedom to liberate others from slavery. 

Pardlo's “A Surname to Honor Their Mother” is featured in Nikole Hannah Jones' THE 1619 PROJECT: A New Origin Story, and The New Republic magazine also featured his "The Famous Athlete Doubts the Planet" in their June issue. 

"School segregation is the epicenter of racial injustice, not just because of its material consequences—such as how it leads to systemic underfunding of urban schools—but also because it conditions people to be suspicious, distrustful, and resentful of those who are different.  We often think about school segregation as a problem faced by Black and Latino children.  But segregation also harms white children.  We’ve known this for some time." 

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, one of the nation's greatest monuments. But while the building was conceived as a shrine and a temple, it quickly took on another role—as the nation's premier backdrop for demonstrations demanding social change.

Dunbar talks about how the Lincoln Memorial set the scene for monumental moments throughout US history.

"Opening the Gates to Global Racial Justice:"

Two creative writing professors from Rutgers–Camden are leading signature efforts of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice

(Spring 2022 Edition)

In the latest episode of Faces & Voices, Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway interviewed Boddie about the road that led her to Rutgers–from the time she recognized her purpose as a student at Harvard Law School to her experiences clerking for Judge Robert L. Carter and serving as director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. to being appointed founding Newark director of Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.

This award is given annually to tenured faculty members in recognition of outstanding service in stimulating and guiding the intellectual development of students at Rutgers University.

The award honors a faculty member (Assistant or Associate Professor, tenure-track or non-tenure track) whose research area disrupts or transforms the interface of two disparate fields of scholarship or inquiry.

Judge Erika Meitner wrote the following about his work: "Reading Patrick Rosal’s The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems is an embodied experience; these poems jump off the page with a muscular exuberance. You can hear their raw emotions singing in your gut, and feel their language in the sway of your limbs...Rosal’s is a poetry of grief and loss, survival and perseverance, as much as it’s a poetry of ecstatic joy and humming eroticism. I chose this book because it moved me immeasurably."

The current May/June 2022 issue of The American Poetry Review has featured Pardlo's poem titled "The Essay on Faith."

Read it here. 

Quoting Patrick Rapa, For The Philly Inquirer:

"To my mind, poetry is best enjoyed aloud and in person. One poet I saw perform at AWP, Patrick Rosal — a Rutgers Camden professor with words like Guggenheim and Fulbright on his CV — crushed it with a midafternoon performance of emphatic, hip-hop-inflected verse. His words boomed across the ballroom. The applause was considerable. Good stuff."

Supporters of a lawsuit accusing the state of perpetuating segregated schools held a lunchtime rally in Trenton on Thursday, March 31.

The dozens who attended represented a cross-section of youth, faith, social justice, and civil rights groups who want state leaders to demolish, what a study determined to be, the home of some of the most segregated schools in the country.

ISGRJ Camden Codirector Patrick Rosal has been honored with a NJ Council of the Arts Award for his work and a proposed book based on his essay "Mutual Regard: A Love Letter for The Origins of Black-Filipino Resistance." 

“What does the average person know about the Black elite in New York in the 1880s? The answer is very little if anything. There’s this huge gap between the Civil War and slavery and then, maybe, the Harlem Renaissance — as if nothing happened in between.”

Photograph by Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO

"...While the inclusion of a Black woman to the court would not shift the conservative majority, it would mark the first time that a large segment of Americans would feel represented by those in power. That visibility alone could go a long way in influencing career choices."

Photograph by Amber Ford/NY Times

Inaugural ISGRJ-Newark Director and Rutgers Law Professor Elise Boddie joins Chris Hayes on MSNBC along with The Nation's Elie Mystal to discuss President Biden's vow to nominate a Black woman to The Supreme Court, and what's at stake as The Supreme Court revisits affirmative action in college admissions.

From the creator of “Downton Abbey,” the new series, set in the late 19th-century, dramatizes the rift between New York City’s wealthy elite and the abject poverty and inequality of the same era. Image credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO

Elise Boddie, Rutgers University–Newark campus director for the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, in a discussion featuring retired New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Gary S. Stein, talks about May 17 as an important and significant date in the history of racial justice, and what it means for equity in education and the future of our public schools.

The first event in the Race and Religion Series out of ISGRJ-Newark featured a book talk by Professor Evelyn Alsultany, Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, leading expert on the History of Representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. Media and acclaimed author of Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion.

Our opening hybrid event of the Viral/Vital Series out of ISGRJ-New Brunswick celebrated World AIDS Day, as we are living the AIDS epidemic in a world now also shaped by COVID-19 and the recent spread of Monkeypox. Our panel consisting of students, artists and activist veterans of the AIDS, COVID-19 and Monkeypox crises considered the long-historical dimensions and practicality of living in a world increasingly shaped by multiple meanings of virality.

ISGRJ-Newark hosted our first in-person signature event featuring Sheryll Cashin, Georgetown Law Professor and acclaimed author. Professor Cashin discussed her most recent book "White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality." The event delivered an intimate and thoughtprovoking discussion of the critical issues related to housing, policing, schools, transportation and the system of American residential caste that is the linchpin of US inequality.

The Rutgers Graduate School of Education, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, and School of Management and Labor Relations presented the Critical Race Theory in Education Lecture and our first signature fall event in October, 2022, with Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings who is credited with introducing researchers and scholars in the field of education to CRT. "Debating What’s Debatable: Understanding the CRT/I Argument" was a thought-provoking and insightful conversation on an important topic. 

In the hope of fostering a transatlantic dialogue, The Dakar Translation Symposium: Africa and its Diasporas (June 14-19) brought together speakers and participants across four continents and four languages and was the first multinational, multidisciplinary, multilingual conference focused on African Diasporas. Panels captured the value of connected stories through multiple themes such as reconnecting identities, gender and diversity, nationhood, Black Lives Matter, and more.

The inaugural virtual statewide conference was held on June 11, 2022. The first in a series of meetings, this conference for educators, community stakeholders, youth and researchers intended to produce an educational equity agenda for the state. The issues addressed included disparities in resources and outcomes, funding, discipline, resource allocation, pre-school, opportunity youth, post-secondary outcomes. special education and segregation. 

A low-key, low-stress lunch talk series aimed at Rutgers Newark Faculty to come together, hang out, and share what they are working on.

Featured Speakers:

Frank Garcia: “Revising the Language of #OwnVoices: Racial/Ethnic Authenticity, Controlling Images, and Gang Life in American Literature” on April 14, 2022.

Domingo Morel: “Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education” on May 11, 2022.

This marquee event for the Institute's "Occasions for Gathering" Series took place virtually on Wednesday, April 27th at 7pm.

Acclaimed poets Patrick Rosal and Tracy K. Smith read together on the occasion of the publication of Rosal’s The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems and Smith’s Such Color: New And Selected Poems. 

This event was hosted by The Writers House at Rutgers University-Camden

The series features group conversations moderated by the Institute's Rutgers-Camden Codirector Greg Pardlo on the following topics: Writers Belonging to Communities, Communities Belonging to Writers on 3/2, Writers Centering Community on 4/6 and Amplifying Community Voices on 5/4.

The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice in partnership with the Office of the Chancellor-Provost at Rutgers University—New Brunswick and Rutgers University Libraries proudly presented its inaugural ISGRJ-New Brunswick event:  "To Turn the Light of Truth Upon Them" | Black Women, Justice, and the Power of the Pen | An Evening on the Soundstage with Nikole Hannah-Jones on Tuesday, April 5, 2022, at 7PM.

This pre-recorded 2-hour event, which premiered on September 23, 2021, served as the official launch of the ISGRJ at Rutgers–Newark and showcased the breadth and depth of racial justice work at Rutgers and the transformational impact—both local and global—that it’s having. The launch video was produced, written and edited by Tania Bentley.