Senior Faculty Fellows
Carlos Decena: Institute Director, Rutgers University—New Brunswick and Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life (2022 - 2026)
Professor, Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
Research and teaching interests: Cultural studies of the Americas, migration and immigration, gender and sexuality, and interdisciplinary approaches to the social sciences
Selected Publications:
Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2023); “Working Trans,” in Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces, edited by Ellie D. Hernández, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Magda Garcia. University of Nebraska Press, 2021; Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men (Duke University Press, 2011)
ISGRJ Projects:
Viral/Vital Conditions, an invitation/provocation for the Rutgers University community, featuring veterans, academics, activists, and artists engaged in deepening our collective understanding of the current COVID-19 pandemic in the context of earlier pandemic outbreaks such as HIV/AIDS and Monkeypox. We will examine the long-historical dimensions and practicality of living in a world increasingly shaped by multiple meanings of "virality:" how do people, communities, and systems learn from previous experiences? What are the politics of race, class, materiality, and representation in fashioning capacious futures for the most vulnerable among us?
The Fellows in Racial Justice (RAJU) at the ISGRJ at Rutgers University (2022-2025), a cross-campus, intellectual learning community which aimed to identify, accompany and mentor generations of life-long intellectual activists in racial justice.
This project centered and maximized the intellectual capital and cultural resources of students, many of whom have been systematically disenfranchised and excluded from knowledge production and centers of power. The RAJU fellows pursued projects to renew, enrich, and maximize on-going racial justice efforts on campus to impact social change locally and globally.
Mayte Green-Mercado: Institute Director, Rutgers University—Newark (2022 - 2026)
Associate Professor, History, Rutgers University–Newark.
Research and teaching interests: Mediterranean, Islamic, and Early Modern Spanish History; displacements, migration, refugees
Selected Publications:
Visions of Deliverance. Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern
Mediterranean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); The Forced Conversion and the Moriscos, in The Handbook of Muslim Iberia, Routledge
ISGRJ Projects:
Race and Religion Series: Intersections of Race, Religion, and Immigration
The goal of the Race and Religion Series, the first of its kind out of ISGRJ-Newark, is to investigate the intersection of race, religion, and immigration. The series featured talks by leading experts on the racialization of Muslims in the United States by exploring issues of diversity, discrimination, inclusion and exclusion, and religious freedom.
The 2024-2025 Sawyer Seminar at Rutgers-Newark: "Potentialities of Justice: Toward Collective Reparative Futures"
This seminar, sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and hosted at Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2024 spring of 2025, explored 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, to illuminate common histories and methodological frameworks that can inform generative responses to past and present social harms.
Patrick Rosal: Institute Director, Rutgers University–Camden (2020 - 2026)
Professor of Creative Writing, Rutgers University-Camden
Research and teaching interests: Cultural Studies; Creative Writing and Literature; Urban and/or Environmental; Race and Ethnic Studies
Selected Publications:
Binyag sa Taglamig (Christened in Winter), Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2023; The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, Persea Books, 2021; Brooklyn Antediluvian, Persea Books, 2016
ISGRJ Projects:
Quilting Water Public Arts Project: an international public art initiative that gathers interviews about water primarily from racialized communities from the U.S. and around the world. The interview is built upon five simple questions about an individual’s memories, observations, and dreams/wishes around water—simply, our past, present, and future. The project has gathered interviews about water from South Africa, Senegal, Cabo Verde, Japan, Puerto Rico, Belgium, the Philippines, the Atayal people of Taiwan, as well as right here in New Jersey. The content of these water stories are made available to local Black artists who craft quilts in dialogue with this global archive.
Occasions for Gathering: this program is part of a collaboration between the Institute and the Writers House at Rutgers University, Camden. This partnership seeks to work with artists to imagine new formats for the presentation of challenging, interdisciplinary literary work that engages questions of racial reckoning.
Kim Butler
Associate Professor, Department of Africana Studies, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Research and teaching interests: African diaspora studies; 20th-century Afro-Brazilian history; Latin America/Caribbean studies
Selected Publications:
Diásporas Imaginarias: Atlántico Negro e Histórias Afro-Brasileiras (with Petrônio Domingues). São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2020; “Carnival, Culture and Black Citizenship in Post-Abolition Bahia,” in Scott Ickes and Berndt Reiter, eds. The Making of Brazil’s Black Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered. MSU Press, 2018. (view); “Masquerading Africa in the Carnival of Salvador Bahia, Brazil, 1895-1905,”African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 10:2 (2017), 203-227. (view)
ISGRJ Project: Insurgent Intersections: Combating Global Anti-Blackness, a multi-year project of the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick exploring how the discipline informs global, intersectional struggles against anti-Blackness. The project also examines how the interventions of Africana Studies intersect with approaches to anti-Blackness from other academic disciplines. Given the failure of current interventions to address anti-Blackness, and racism in general, it is vital that we shift our focus to the insights, priorities, and strategies that come from the lived experiences of those most directly affected. That knowledge comes not only from the academy, but also the work of activists, artists, and everyday community members. Insurgent Intersections places these voices in dialogue to inform a new way forward towards social justice.
Charles Senteio
Associate Professor of Library and Information Science, Rutgers School of Communication and Information, Rutgers-New Brunswick
Research and teaching interests: Health Equity, Data Equity, AI Bias, Algorithmic Bias
Selected Publications:
Write It Like You See It: Detectable Differences in Clinical Notes By Race Lead To Differential Model Recommendations (2022). AIES 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society; The efficacy of health IT in supporting Black and Hispanic chronic disease patients: A Systematic Review (2022). Journal of Medical Internet Research; Sleep Disturbance and Strain Among Caregivers of Persons Living With Dementia (2021). Aging Neurosci, among others.
ISGRJ Project: Health Humanities, Communications, and Informatics Working Group, researching and coordinating future possibilities for a Data Equity Initiative at the School of Communication and Information and ISGRJ at Rutgers, supporting the RU HEAR committee, and developing programs and initiatives that will develop the Institute's Black Bodies, Black Health signature project.
Brittney Cooper
Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and Africana Studies, Rutgers–New Brunswick
Research and teaching interests: Black Women’s Intellectual History, Black Feminist Thought, Hip Hop Feminisms, Hip Hop Studies, Race and Gender Representation in Popular Culture, Digital Feminisms, and New Media
Selected Publications:
Stand Up: Ten Mighty Women Who Made a Change (Scholastic, 2022); Feminist AF: A Guide to Crushing Girlhood (co-author with Susana Morris and Chanel Craft Tanner -- Norton, 2021); Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s, 2018) -- New York Times Bestseller, Best Book of 2018 from NPR, the Atlantic, Bustle, and many others; Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, 2017) -- Winner of the Merle Curti Prize for Best Book in U.S. Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians, 2018, among others.
ISGRJ Project: Race and Gender Equity (R.A.G.E.) Lab: Black Feminism in the Public Sphere. A multi-modal research incubator committed to pursuing feminist research questions related to the intellectual production and social thriving of Black women and girls.
Enobong (Anna) Branch
Professor of Sociology, Rutgers–New Brunswick and Senior Vice President for Equity at Rutgers
Research and teaching interests: Labor, work, and the historical roots and contemporary underpinnings of racial and gender inequality
Selected Publications: Author of Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work (2011) and coauthor of Black in America: The Paradox of the Color Line (2020)
ISGRJ Project: Black Bodies, Black Health: Imagining a Just Racial Future. A one-year research project, supported by a $725,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that brings together cross-disciplinary groups of experts to explore structural racism in service of creating equitable health outcomes.
Keith Michael Green
Associate Professor of English and Communication, Africana Studies, Rutgers–Camden
- 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 Highlight: 2024 Rutgers University Academic Affairs Research Council Grant for the 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 slavery was indeed present in colonial New England. Through estate and church records, Green will also produce an unprecedented recording of Black and Indigenous membership in the Pilgrims’ founding American church.
Stacy Hawkins
Vice Dean and Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School
Research and Teaching Interests: Intersection of law and diversity, employment law and diversity, higher education and diversity, constitutional law, and employment law
Selected Publications: Published in the Fordham Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, UCLA Law Review Discourse, and the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, among others
ISGRJ Project: An applied research project exploring whether the beneficial features and pedagogical model associated with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) can be successfully replicated by a historically white institution (HWI) in a manner that leads to improved academic achievement for Black and other targeted high-risk students attending HWIs.
Jamie Lew
Associate Professor of Sociology, Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems, Rutgers–Newark
Research and Teaching Interests: Sociology of education, immigration, international migration, and race and ethnicity, exploring intersections of immigration and race particularly in relation to education for migrant youths in urban space
Selected Publications: Asian Americans in Class:Charting the Achievement Gap Among Korean American Youth (Teachers College Press, 2006); Asian American Children and Poverty: Multicultural Education Context (Banks, J., Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education, SAGE publications, 2013), among others
ISGRJ Project: An exploration of how urban refugee families and children negotiate their sense of belonging and placemaking in cities in the U.S. and abroad.
Luis Rivera
Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Rutgers Implicit Social Cognition (RISC) Lab, Rutgers–Newark
Research and Teaching Interests: Implicit social cognitive processes underlying stereotyped attitudes and their shaping of the self, identity, and health of stigmatized individuals
Selected Publications: The detrimental effect of affirming masculinity on judgments of gay men (2018); Incarceration and health of sexual and gender minority persons (American Journal of Public Health, 108(8), 994-999, 2018), among others
ISGRJ Project: An investigation of whether white individuals express implicit and explicit biases to down-regulate collective guilt and protect their group image. Findings from this project will have implications for how to improve racial justice education and, in turn, reduce implicit and explicit biases.
