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Congratulations to Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice 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 in New Jersey and around the world.
Stephens was one of 3 recipients of the award presented by Rutgers Global Health Institute Director and Henry Rutgers Professor of Global Health, Richard Marlink at the RGHI Membership virtual meeting on October 10, 2024.
Read the third edition of our newsletter, at the beginning of ISGRJ’s fifth year as a research institute devoted to advancing the humanistic study of race, supported by a generous Higher Learning grant from the Mellon Foundation. As we enter the final two years of grant-funded activity, we write to introduce new members of the ISGRJ community, update everyone on our continuing programs and initiatives, and share key milestones and events from the past academic year.
Read our 2023 ISGRJ Newsletter, which lays out some of our activities and accomplishments of the year.
With our thanks again to Rutgers’ leaders, President Holloway, Chancellor Cantor, Chancellor Conway, Chancellor Tillis and Chancellor Strom, and the generous Deans and Provosts who have worked with the members of the ISGRJ team over the course of the past three years on any number of academic initiatives and administrative challenges.
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.
Read the publication of the first edition of our newsletter, 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!
The Black Bibliography Project. a Mellon-funded collaboration between Rutgers and Yale, led by co-PIs Dr. Jacqueline Goldsby and Dr. Meredith McGill and a Rutgers Research Initiative of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice is pleased to announce the launch of its series of blog posts from graduate fellows on their archival work within local repositories like the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. These posts will be released bi-weekly and can be found on the Black Bibliography Project website under the tab, Fieldnotes From The Archive.
Two years ago, in 2023, against the backdrop of the Perth Amboy shoreline where enslaved Black people arrived to be held in bondage in New Jersey for over 200 years, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice launched and convened the New Jersey Reparations Council. Co-chaired by Taja-Nia Henderson (Rutgers Graduate School-Newark Dean and Rutgers Law School Professor) and Khalil Gibran Muhammad (Princeton University and ISGRJ consultant), the council was the first-of-its-kind to confront New Jersey’s deep and often overlooked involvement in slavery. In this unique collaboration between leading experts from various disciplines, many of whom are Rutgers and ISGRJ-affiliated, the Council was composed of nine committees, each of which addressed an aspect of the enduring impact of slavery in New Jersey.
On Juneteenth, 2025, the Council unveiled “For Such a Time as This: The Nowness of Reparations for Black People in New Jersey," a groundbreaking report connecting New Jersey’s deep embrace of slavery and its own Jim Crow era to today’s vast racial disparities. The report presents almost 100 policy recommendations for strengthening our democracy, improving health care access, eliminating environmental racism, ending school and housing segregation, closing the wealth gap, and dismantling a punitive and racially discriminatory criminal legal system.
Congratulations to the ISGRJ faculty who received awards in the 2024-2025 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 council is made up of Rutgers faculty from across the campuses and has been providing internal awards to the Rutgers faculty for over 80 years. It is the only peer-to-peer funding program at Rutgers.
The following ISGRJ faculty members were honored with a Research on Social and Racial Justice Award: Early Career Faculty Fellow Julio Alicea, and Alex Hinton, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights - an Affiliate Center of the ISGRJ.
Our Beginnings
2020: A New Direction
The establishment of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice marks a new direction among higher education institutions by using humanistic theories, methods and approaches to study global issues of race and social justice. The institute will span the entire university and will include centers at Rutgers’ campuses in Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden.
The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice named four of the university’s most distinguished academic scholars in civil rights, history, literature, and creative writing as directors of campus branches across the university and launched a postdoctoral program supporting research in anti-racism and social inequality.
Michelle Stephens is steering the work of the new institute, funded through a $15 million five-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, that will bring together scholars from across the university to use humanistic theories, methods and approaches to study global issues of race and social justice.