ISGRJ Early Career Faculty Fellows (Cohort IV, 2024–2025)

Julio Alicea is an assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Camden. His research interests include racial solidarity politics, organizational theory, and urban education. He teaches courses on race and ethnicity, the sociology of education, and introductory sociology.  He earned his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Keisha April is a lawyer and psychologist whose research examines factors that contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in the juvenile justice system. Using mixed methods approaches, she examines the attitudes and beliefs of the individuals who interact with and work within the justice system, to inform policies and practices to reduce disparities and promote more positive outcomes for justice-involved and at-risk youth. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Drexel University.

Valerie Adams-Bass is an applied researcher seeking to advance scholarship that provides meaningful contributions to the lives of Black youth and their families. Her research integrates contextual factors with a focus on how Black children see themselves and related outcomes. Her research also investigates how racial/ethnic socialization experiences and racial identity are related to the process of identity development, the social and the academic experiences of Black children and youth. 

Alexandria Bauer earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research interests include understanding and addressing health disparities that burden Black/African American and other minoritized populations, particularly using community-based participatory research strategies. Her work focuses on reducing health inequity by developing community interventions and resources, targeting social determinants of health, and improving available treatments for mental health conditions.

Nicole Burrowes is an educator, historian, community organizer, and trainer. She is a scholar of the African Diaspora and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research interests include social movements, relational histories of race and colonialism, Black Internationalism, and the politics of solidarity focused on the twentieth century Caribbean and the United States. She has extensive experience working with communities of color for transformative justice. 

Germán Cadenas is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP). He also serves as inaugural Associate Director of the Center for Youth Social Emotional Wellness. His work is community-based, with intersecting foci on the psychology of immigration and on critical consciousness as a tool for social justice. His advocacy and research have informed the implementation of policies and programs to support undocumented students in higher education at major universities.

Carla Cevasco is a scholar interested in food, the body, gender, and race in early America and beyond. She is Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her scholarship has appeared in Early American Studies, New England Quarterly, Art History, and Journal of Early American History. Her public writing has been featured in The Atlantic, TIME, Lapham's Quarterly, Nursing Clio, Common-Place, The Junto, and The Recipes Project.

Karishma Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Education, Culture and Society program at the Graduate School of Education. Her interdisciplinary research, teaching and community-engaged work employ anthropological and feminist lenses in the study of childhood/youth, race, gender, and education. Her central concerns gravitate around the politics of knowledge and attend to how gendered and racialized differences are stabilized and unsettled within educational contexts.    

Tajah Ebram works as the Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers Libraries and is the Team Lead for the Black Bibliography Project—  a Mellon funded digital project to build a database of Black book history and print culture. Her research, teaching and community work focus on Black feminisms, carceral studies, environmentalism and Philadelphia Black freedom movements. She obtained her PhD in English, with a focus on Black literary and cultural histories, in 2020 at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Shanna Jean-Baptiste’s research and teaching include Francophone West African and Caribbean literatures, particularly Haitian literature; identity formation and gender politics; visual art and music; and Afrofuturist aesthetics in the Francophone world. She earned a joint Ph.D. in French and African American Studies from Yale University.   

Carla Murphy is an assistant professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a former social justice journalist with nearly 20 years of experience as a features writer and long-form investigative reporter and editor. Her reportage, essays and opinion writing have appeared in Colorlines, The Nation, Dissent, Christian Science Monitor, The Daily Beast, The American Prospect, Talking Points Memo, Women’s eNews, and local news outlets. 

Allison Page is Associate Professor of Media Studies. Her first monograph, Media and the Affective Life of Slavery, examines the relationship between racial formation, affective governance, and media culture about U.S. chattel slavery. Her current book project historicizes how media technologies became positioned as a prime solution to racialized police violence in the United States. She received her PhD in Critical Media Studies with a graduate minor in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. 

Sangita Pudasainee-Kapri is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers School of Nursing-Camden. She is a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner and a nationally Certified Pediatric Nurse with over a decade of experience working in a variety of clinical settings in the United States and Nepal. Her current research focuses on the impact of social determinants of health and maternal and child health disparities in the global context.

Seema Saifee is an Assistant Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School-Camden, where she teaches criminal procedure and criminal law.  Her research explores how individuals and communities most harmed by mass incarceration produce knowledge and develop strategies to reduce prison populations. 

Anthony Ureña is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers–Newark. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University and completed his postdoctoral training at Princeton University. Anthony holds a bachelor's degree in sociology and human biology from Brown University, where he was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. A sociologist of health and inequality, his substantive areas of research interest encompass race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and risk.

Shelley Zhang is a musician, creative writer, President of the Association for Chinese Music Research, and Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology. Her scholarly work examines issues of migration, citizenship, and race, with a particular focus on the professional careers of Chinese musicians in Western art music and the experiences of first-generation immigrants in North America. She completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Wolf Humanities Fellow.