Leadership

Meet Our Faculty: In this Rutgers Global Health Institute content series, we highlight our core faculty members.

She may not have realized it at the time, but Michelle Stephens’s apparently disparate professional roles – as the dean of humanities at Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences and as a psychoanalyst – placed her perfectly to create a major scholarly initiative examining the interplay between race and health. That endeavor, Black Bodies, Black Health, is a signature project of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, founded at Rutgers in 2020 by Stephens, who also serves as its executive director.

Congratulations to the ISGRJ faculty who received awards this year from The Rutgers Research Council Awards. The program offers grant opportunities to support faculty research and especially to encourage scholarship in tackling challenging disciplinary problems in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts.

The following ISGRJ faculty members were honored with a Research on Social and Racial Justice Award: Senior Faculty Fellow Keith Green, Black Bodies, Black Health Project Steering Committee member Luis Rivera, Scarlet & Black Research Center Scholar Kendra Boyd. Congratulations also to the faculty leaders of the Insurgent Intersections project, Kim Butler, Akissi Britton and Shantee Rosado from Africana Studies, for receiving a Collaborative Multidisciplinary Award!

We're thrilled to announce the new digital publication, and immersive story of our ISGRJ and sponsored research projects!

These projects and initiatives housed administratively at or affiliated with ISGRJ contribute to the Institute’s overall direction and vision regarding the need for a humanistic, interdisciplinary, systems approach to examining racialization and racism.

The Institute works together with primary investigators to support, encourage, advise on, and help generate collaborative, interdisciplinary, research projects designed by ISGRJ’s Campus Directors and other Rutgers faculty. These projects include ISGRJ signature research projects, Rutgers research initiatives and research partnerships. 

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. 

Michelle Stephens Among Top Rutgers Black History Month Researchers and Leaders 

It is with great pleasure that we share the publication of the first edition of our newsletter.

Here we are chronicling and reflecting on all of our signature projects, initiatives, programs and people who have begun the journey with us, in the first 2 years of our existence, one quiet and planning, the other launching and live.

Thank you so much for your generous support in this first phase of our launch as an important presence on the Rutgers campuses!