Conversation & Connections
About this series:
The Conversation & Connections series at ISGRJ-Newark is a platform for Rutgers-Newark faculty to discuss their works in progress. This was a low-key, low-stress opportunity to come together, hang out, and hear about what Rutgers-Newark faculty and researchers are working on.
Events in this series:
Contaminated Marshes and Headless Palms: the Environment and the Ghosts of War in Contemporary Arabic and Persian Fiction of the Iran-Iraq War with Amir Moosavi | December 4, 2023
The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Newark proudly continues its "Conversation & Connections" series with the next presentation featuring Amir Moosavi, Assistant Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University-Newark.
About the featured speaker:
Amir Moosavi is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark. He holds a PhD in Middle East and Islamic studies from New York University. His research and teaching interests center around Arabic and Persian literatures, with a focus on modern and contemporary fiction. His publications have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Middle East Critique, Alif, and Iran Namag, among other venues.
In 2021, he co-edited Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture (Leiden UP, 2021). During his fellowship year with ISGRJ he will complete his book manuscript titled Dust That Never Settled: Afterlives of the Iran-Iraq War in Arabic and Persian Literatures and two articles related to a second project on cultural representations of the late Cold War era in the Middle East.
Past events in this series
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The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Newark proudly presents "Conversation and Connections" series with the next fall 2023 presentation by Ezgi Cakmak, ISGRJ Postdoctoral Associate and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. Her presentation will be on Reminders of the Imperial Nostalgia: Encounters with Blackness in the Early Turkish Republic.
About the Presenter:
Ezgi Cakmak is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice in Africana Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. She received her Ph.D. as a Benjamin Franklin Fellow of Africana Studies and History at the University of Pennsylvania. Before her doctoral studies, she worked with NGOs in the field of international migration and conducted fieldwork with African migrants in Istanbul. Her research interests include African slavery in the late Ottoman Empire, identity formation and racialization processes in the early Turkish Republic as well as diaspora studies.
Ezgi Cakmak, ISGRJ Postdoctoral Associate and Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark presents during the Conversation & Connections lecture series 
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The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Newark proudly continued its Conversation & Connection series with a feature presentation by Wendell Marsh, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.
His presentation was titled "Religious Readings of a West African Sufi."
About the Presenter:
Wendell Marsh is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark and the 2023-2024 cohort of Early Career Faculty Fellows at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. He received a PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and from the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University in 2018. His scholarship focuses on African-Arabic textuality, the intellectual history of Islam in Africa and the African Diaspora, and religious studies. His first research project focuses on texts by and about the Muslim polymath from colonial Senegal Shaykh Musa Kamara. He has been awarded the Fulbright fellowship, a Ford dissertation fellowship, and a postdoc at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern University.
ISGRJ-Newark Campus Director Mayte Green-Mercado introduces the first "Conversation & Connections" presentation of fall 2023 featuring Professor Wendell Marsh 
Professor Wendell Marsh presents "Religious Readings of a West African Sufi" as part of Conversation & Connections on October 2, 2023 
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“Developing Scholars: Race, Politics, and the Pursuit of Higher Education” with Domingo Morel, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Affiliate member of Global Urban Studies and the Center on Law, Inequality, and Metropolitan Equity.
About the presenter:
Professor Domingo Morel teaches racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, education politics and public policy. Specifically, his research explores the ways state policies help expand or diminish political inequality among historically marginalized populations.
He is the author of Developing Scholars: Race, Politics and the Pursuit of Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award. I am also co-editor, with Marion Orr, of Latino Mayors: Power and Political Change in the Postindustrial City (Temple University Press, 2018).
In addition to his scholarship, he has years of applied experience in political affairs and public policy. He is co-founder of the Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University and past president of the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee.
Professor Morel received his Ph.D. in political science from Brown University in 2014.
Domingo Morel presents during the Conversation & Connections lecture series 
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The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Newark is inviting Rutgers Newark faculty to the second event in our Conversation & Connections lunch series: “Revising the Language of #OwnVoices: Racial/Ethnic Authenticity, Controlling Images, and Gang Life in American Literature”
Our featured speaker is Frank Garcia, Assistant Professor of American Literature and English, and Affiliate Faculty in African American & African Studies.
About the featured speaker:
Frank García is an Assistant Professor of English and affiliate of the Department of Africana studies and program in American studies. His research and teaching specialize in Latina/o/x and American literature, film, and culture; gang and prison literature and film; and critical race and queer studies. His monograph Clicas: Gender, Sexuality, and Struggle in Latina/o/x Gang Literature and Film (University of Texas Press, 2024) theorizes the literary and filmic representation of Chicago, Southern California, and Northern Triangle gang culture, masculinity, gender/sexual politics, aesthetics, and violence. His further research covers a panoply of critical race, multiethnic, and queer studies issues, including the problem of authenticity in the #OwnVoices movement, the representation of racialized sexuality in Disney film, the racial politics of contemporary African American dandyism, Chicano film history and historiography, borderlands cinema, queer Chicana/o/x filmmaking, and queer Latinx theory.
