Spectral Evidence: Poems by Gregory Pardlo (Knopf, January 30, 2024)
A powerful mediation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air Traffic
Elegant, profound, and intoxicating—this is the author's first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest. Pardlo ponders the development of his own identity and sense of self as it was shaped against the glaring forces of whiteness.
Each profile details the researcher's academic background, research interests, publications, and ongoing projects. Serving as both showcase and connector, this resource aims to facilitate collaboration, mentorship, and a broader understanding of race and ethnicity among Rutgers researchers, students, and the wider academic community. The database allows users the ability to search by campus, and also to filter the results by research area.
The Black Ecologies Signature Lab at the ISGRJ draws together threads in order to generate scholarship, artistry, and other resources that aid in infusing public and scholarly discourse as well as our broader cultural imaginaries with the insights generated through the analytical insights, methods, and theories related to Black Ecologies and its closely allied fields, including Black Geographies. The lab provides a suite of digital projects, speaker series and workshops, community engagement events, teaching and undergraduate program development, and publications to foment Rutgers as a major center for Black ecological studies for faculty, students, and community.
“The Arts as Black Resistance in Eighteenth-Century London: The Life and World of Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780)” is an interdisciplinary, arts-focused research group affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-New Brunswick and comprised of faculty from the Mason Gross School of the Arts (Departments of Music and Theater), the School of Arts and Sciences (Departments of Art History, English, and History), and the Rutgers University Libraries as well as scholars from institutions elsewhere in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The research group, led by Rebecca Cypess, former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers–New Brunswick, has worked together to build a public-facing digital platform that addresses the arts in the worldview and practice of Ignatius Sancho, a Black British writer and musician who was deeply engaged with the visual and performing arts as means for resisting discrimination, dehumanization, and the enslavement of Black people in London and across the British empire.
Even as new research is emerging about Sancho’s biography, the research group offers the results of its work on antiracism in the arts in Sancho’s worldview and practice. With the use of audio/visual materials as well as explanatory essays written by members of the research group, the site offers a new understanding of eighteenth-century London, situating Ignatius Sancho within a racially and culturally complex landscape and highlighting the role of the arts in advancing the cause of racial justice.
Image credit: Francesco Bartolozzi, engraving of Ignatius Sancho after a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough (1768). The engraving was later printed in the posthumous collection Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African.
Congratulations to Pulitzer prize-winning Rutgers-Newark professor and ISGRJ Senior Faculty Fellow Salamishah Tillet for being awarded the Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing from the Gordon Parks Foundation!!
The foundation’s fellowship supports work on representation and social justice inspired by Parks’s legendary photography, writing, and filmmaking. Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing and the executive director of Express Newark.
Concurrently, Scheherazade Tillet, an activist and photographer, has been awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in Art. This is the first time the foundation has awarded two siblings fellowships for their distinct bodies of work.
In honor of photographer Gordon Parks’s historic collaboration with writer Ralph Ellison–who worked together on a photo essay illustrating themes from Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man” and another piece documenting Harlem’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic– Tillet will work with her sister on a series of projects exploring the themes of Black girlhood and play.
Today, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences (IADAS) announced the winners of the 4th Annual Anthem Awards, the largest and most comprehensive social impact award, presented by the Webby Awards.
We are thrilled to share the news that our book, Black Bodies, Black Health (a visual archive chronicling our 18-month research project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), was honored with an Anthem Award in the Health Awareness Book, Story, or Feature category! This is the second award for this book, which previously won the Award of Distinction in the Educational Institution Print Content category at the 30th Annual Communicator Awards.