Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice

We conceived of the Institute less as one monolithic place, and more as an intellectual network and corridor, connecting our activities across Rutgers, and across New Jersey.

We wanted to display Rutgers’ scholarly status as a whole greater than the sum of its parts: that we could pull scholars doing research on race together from across all of the campuses, that we could envision and actualize a vibrant intellectual corridor which would advance their research, increase its public relevance and impact, and allow us all to teach, and learn from communities beyond the academy, working collaboratively towards the vision of a more just and equitable world.

It may sound idealistic, but I would prefer to say it is based on the blend of principles and imagination required to get important and meaningful work done.

We spent the 2020 to 2021 academic year building the cross-campus infrastructure of the Institute.

The Institute made its public debut at Rutgers-Newark in September of 2021 under the leadership of our Inaugural Newark Director, Elise Boddie – Henry Rutgers Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School and a Judge Robert L. Carter Scholar, whose scholarship explores the regulation of race in law and policy that perpetuate racial inequality. Elise Boddie led a 2-hour virtual launch, celebrating and showcasing the breadth and depth of transformational racial justice work occurring at Rutgers-Newark—both locally and globally. The launch attracted a wide and far-reaching web audience of over 250 live viewers, and served as the first, distinctive platform upon which the transformative work within the Rutgers-Newark campus and its city and community was showcased in one single event.

A large number of these programs bring to fruition Chancellor Nancy Cantor’s vision of Rutgers-Newark, as a publicly engaged anchor institution not just in Newark but of Newark. Such programs include: NJStep, focused on rewriting the narrative of incarcerated men; The Honors Living Learning Community: a bold, comprehensive and imaginative initiative that activates young people in Newark to become change-agents; And Newest Americans, which focuses on the cultural dimensions of migration from the perspective of the most diverse student body and campus in the United States. 

We're enormously proud and honored to announce that Director Boddie, a nationally recognized scholar on dismantling systemic racism, has been appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, the second highest leadership position within the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She departed Rutgers at the end of summer 2022 and has joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty . We celebrate her accomplishment and wish her all the best, and welcome enthusiastically the next Director of ISGRJ-Newark, Mayte Green-Mercado, who is an Associate Professor of History, Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Minor in the History Department, and Co-Director of the Mediterranean Displacements Project. Her courses deal with questions of religion, politics, identity, and race and ethnicity in the medieval and early modern periods. 

For Co-Directors Gregory Pardlo and Patrick Rosal, both prestigious, award-winning poets and writers at Rutgers-Camden, the priority for ISGRJ-Camden was to reinvigorate our sense of the university as a community of care, as we all continue to endure the COVID-19 global pandemic. Together and in partnership with The Rutgers-Camden Writers House they curated the “Occasions for Gathering” Series, with a focus on creative expression and opportunities for discussion, group writing, reading, collaboration, and art making. In the “Writing Our Communities” Series spearheaded by Greg Pardlo, participants and speakers pondered together such questions as: How does a writer create authentic partnerships that center community? And how can writing with a community effect social change?

In April, Pat Rosal hosted 2017-2019 US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith as the marquee closing event in the Occasions for Gathering series.

April also saw our public launch at ISGRJ-New Brunswick, with an event with two speakers who exemplify the vision of excellence and empathy Chancellor-Provost Francine Conway has articulated as important to her leadership.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, the New Brunswick Campus Director of ISGRJ and the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History, hosted our first On the Soundstage Speaker Series, a conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones entitled "To Turn the Light of Truth Upon Them: Black Women, Justice, and the Power of the Pen." The talk sold out within hours of the registration link going live, and we were thrilled and honored to be at capacity for our first in-person, inaugural event at Rutgers-New Brunswick in front of an audience of Rutgers University leadership, faculty, staff, students and the broader public.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar also serves as the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians. Her publications, teaching, and documentary appearances, have placed her among a small number of African American women scholars who study Black women’s history up to and beyond the Civil War. Dunbar has built a name for herself, and for black women's history more broadly, both inside and outside of the academy.

Together with Associate Director and Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life, Carlos Decena, an interdisciplinary scholar of immigration and queer studies, ISGRJ-New Brunswick supports a variety of research groups and public engagement projects ranging from long-term research examining racist social policy across centuries, to highly-focused seminars for faculty and postdoctoral fellows, to performances and exhibits featuring the works of influential and emerging Black artists. As Cross-Campus Director of Undergraduate Intellectual Life, Carlos launched the Office of Undergraduate Intellectual Life, which will be spearheading mentorship programs and pedagogical initiatives to support student arts, activism, scholarship and leadership in diversity, equity, inclusion and justice across the university.