Rising Scholars: Support Opportunities for Early and Mid-Career Scholars
Excitedly, we celebrate our ISGRJ Postdoctoral Fellows, who have spent the last one to two years with us. We have been proud to support their research in areas of inquiry related to anti-racism and social inequality. Our thanks to all the Rutgers faculty who served as colleagues and mentors and we wish them all well on their next endeavors!
The Institute is pleased to introduce its new Race, Labor and Public Policy Fellowship focused specifically on the relationship between, and translation of, research and public policy writing and activism.
Congratulations to our first two fellows, James Jones (Africana Studies, School of Arts and Sciences, Newark) and Sheri Davis Faulkner (School of Management and Labor Relations, New Brunswick), who will be planning and leading a series of activities for the program — including public events and workshops around books that demonstrate the blend of scholarly, humanities-based approaches, public policy writing and research projects with undergraduates in this area.
Featuring new publications from a rich array of scholars from multiple humanistic disciplines across Rutgers—from law to language, from philosophy to art, from history to gender studies, from sociology to health—who are committed to the study of race and related systems of inequity. We showcase the depth and breadth of their research and writing, as we work collaboratively towards the vision of a more just and equitable world.
From blue-note turmoil to grace-note power, Black women preachers stand tall. In Colored Women Sittin' on High, Melanie R. Hill offers a new perspective on the art of the sermon in African American literature, music, and theology. Drawing on the womanist cadence of Alice Walker in literature and the rhythmical flow of named womanist theologians, Hill makes interventions at the intersections of African American literary criticism, music, and religious studies.
The Great Migration saw more than six million African Americans leave the US South between 1910 and 1970. Though the experiences of migrant laborers are well-known, countless African Americans also left the South to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and viewed business as key to Black liberation. Detroit’s status as a mecca for Black entrepreneurship illuminates this overlooked aspect of the Great Migration story.
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.
The ability to achieve economic security through hard work is a central tenet of the American Dream, but significant shifts in today’s economy have fractured this connection. In Work in Black and White, sociologists Enobong "Anna" Branch and Caroline Hanley draw on interviews with 80 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told about the American Dream – and about who should have access to it and who should not.
A history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from the Great Migration to the era of Black Power.
In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods.
Clicas examines Latina/o/x literature and film by and/or about gay and women gang members. Through close readings of literature and film, Frank García reimagines the typical narratives describing gang membership and culture, amplifying and complicating critical gang studies in the social sciences and humanities and looking at gangs across racial, ethnic, and national identities.
While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at an unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. By examining the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Anthony Grasso shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins
The collected life-work of an interdisciplinary writer, performer, and central figure in the Black Gay cultural arts and AIDS movements.
In this timely collection of poetry, plays, fiction, and performance texts, Assotto Saint draws upon music and incantation, his Haitian heritage, and a politics of liberation to weaves together a tapestry of literature that celebrates life in the face of death.
Immigration has been at the heart of US politics for centuries. In Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics, Yalidy Matos examines the inherent moral, value-based, nature of white Americans' immigration attitudes, including preferences on local immigration enforcement programs, federal immigration policy, and levels of legal immigration allowed. Does identifying as white always signify a commitment to maintain the racial status quo or can it result in commitments to racial justice?
Freedom's Captives is a compelling exploration of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Pacific coast of Colombia, the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by people of African descent. .
Racism continues to infuse Congress’s daily practice of lawmaking and shape who obtains congressional employment. In this timely and provocative book, James Jones reveals how and why many who work in Congress call it the “Last Plantation.” He shows that even as the civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s and antidiscrimination laws were implemented across the nation, Congress remained exempt from federal workplace protections for decades.
A powerful collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class and its failures for those rendered invisible by it. Bread and Circus demonstrates that self-interest fails when people become commodities themselves, and shows how the most vulnerable—including the author and her family—have been impacted by that failure.
In immigration courts across America, a non-citizen convicted of an “aggravated felony” will almost certainly face deportation with no access to asylum. The term encompasses more than thirty offenses, ranging from check fraud and shoplifting to filing a false tax return. This book chronicles the rise of the use of the aggravated felony, known by lawyers as the “immigration law death penalty,” to criminalize and then deport immigrants.
For nearly two decades, Patrick Rosal has been one of the most beloved and admired poets in the United States, bringing together the most dynamic aspects of literary and performance poetry. The son of Filipino immigrants (his father was a lapsed Catholic priest), he has made a life of bridging worlds―literary, ethnic, national, spiritual―through his poetry, and has been recognized with some of the highest honors and countless devoted readers.
Creole Noise is a history of Creole, or 'dialect', literature and performance in the English-speaking Caribbean, from the late eighteenth century to the early 19th century. By emphasizing multiracial origins, transnational influences, and musical performance alongside often violent historical events of the nineteenth century, it revises the common view that literary dialect in the Caribbean was a relatively modern, 20th century phenomenon, associated with regional anti-colonial or black-affirming nationalist projects.
In the near future, a young woman finds her mother’s body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students―living through a drought and at the edge of the war―as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator’s life and the manuscript begin to become entangled.
Choral Reflections offers inspiration, ideas, and insights for conductor-teachers at any stage. The goal for Choral Reflections is to provide a platform for a new and more representative cross-section of American choral conductor-teachers to share their resflections, beliefs, values, and visions for the choral art.
The word “dignity” is not typically used in education, yet it is at the core of strong pedagogy. By bringing together a collection of chapters written by authors with wide-ranging expertise, this volume presents a powerful approach to education that reminds people of their somebodiness—the premise that each person inherently possesses the intellectual acumen and creative resources to pursue development on their own terms.
Ghost Letters creates a ghost mother who becomes a presiding presence in Baba Badji’s first collection of poems. His poetry explores what it means to be Senegalese, American, and Black, as well as the bonds of Black people across the Black diaspora.
Chancellors, deans, and the ISGRJ executive director, in consultation with department chairs, nominate promising scholars working in the areas of social justice and racial inequality for a one-year fellowship at the institute. Fellows receive partial support toward a course release, $2,500 in research funds, and access to institute-funded events throughout Rutgers and benefit from mentoring and professional development.
These humanities-centered fellowships support recent doctoral recipients whose research demonstrates a deep investment in the areas of inquiry related to anti-racism and social inequality.
These fellowships support scholars engaged in the examination of the global dimensions of anti-Black racism and its impact on the Americas (1580 to the present).
Named term chairs support the most promising assistant and associate professors working in the areas of social justice and racial inequality. Nominated by deans and department chairs and funded for five years by the Mellon Foundation, these faculty receive a summer salary, travel and research funding, and access to institute-funded events.
An array of opportunities supporting a culture of mentorship and building communities of care.
The Research Council Awards program offers six annual award opportunities to support faculty research and especially to encourage scholarship tackling challenging disciplinary problems in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts. The council has proudly been providing internal awards to the Rutgers faculty for the past 80 consecutive years.
The Individual Fulcrum Awards is tailored to individual researchers and those in the creative arts who are testing out new ideas to accelerate their scientific inquiry, program of research and scholarship, or creative production.
The Social and Racial Justice Awards supports academic research on racial and social justice in all domains of intellectual, social, artistic, and environmental life.
The Collaborative Multidisciplinary Awards offers the opportunity for a group of faculty members across disciplines to work together on a new, shared problem or line of research.
The Subvention Awards for the Publication of Scholarly Books provides partial subsidies to university and other highly regarded scholarly presses to cover a portion of the cost of publishing a scholarly book.
The Manuscript Review Awards helps faculty members publish authoritative, thought-provoking, field-changing books.
The Climate Action Awards, new for the 2022 funding cycle, is designed to support faculty whose work addresses the global climate crisis and its solutions at a variety of scales.
