The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the deadly consequences of racial disparities in health. More than spotlighting racial health inequity, however, the pandemic exposed anew the depths of staggering racial inequality nationwide. In every sector from education to the labor market, housing to healthcare, the provision to meet basic human needs and take steps to ensure wellness were racially unequal. These are national problems but as one of the most diverse states in the country, New Jersey holds several unwelcome distinctions for long-standing inequities in critical systems that have profound implications for vulnerability to poor health outcomes.  

What would we learn from bringing humanists, social scientists, and biomedical researchers to the table to explore, unpack, and disrupt structural racism in service of creating equitable health outcomes? What would a just racial future require to remediate the imprints of the past in the structures of our present? This research project, supported by a $725,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, brings together cross-disciplinary groups of experts to explore and unpack structural racism in service of creating equitable health outcomes, centering humanistic and social scientific approaches.  

RWJF approached ISGRJ explicitly due to our reputation as an Institute founded on Humanities research, and also due to our location in the state university of New Jersey. The Foundation continues to draw on the expertise of Director Stephens and other Rutgers humanists, such as Shakespearean and early modern scholar Patricia Akhimie, to bring their humanistic scholarly perspectives on race and health to conversations among RWJF leaders, program officers, and grantees.  

The Black Bodies Black Health project has produced a report for RWJF that answers these questions, and a book chapter describing a research process that included workshops on the meaning of “race” and “disruption,” with the aim of creating a shared vocabulary among an interdisciplinary group of seed grantees from the diverse fields of the environmental sciences, history, labor relations, medicine, nursing, philosophy, psychology, and social work.

Led by Stephens, Branch, and a steering committee of faculty experts in queer studies, public health, family medicine, community health, the sociology of health, and the psychology of implicit bias, the research team held a 3-day conference with external scholars on August 17-19, 2021, focusing on racial health disparities and achieving health equity. The conference culminated in a Presidential Keynote by sitting Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway entitled "Mapping Value: The Material Consequences of Structural Racism."

The project culminated in June 2023 with an event for stakeholders who discussed the findings from this research, and its implications for physician education in race and health equity, the role of the carceral state and environmental racism, the physiological impact of racism on black bodies, and the efficacy of the United States health care delivery system, in communities ranging across the state, nation, and world. ISGRJ’s goal with this research project was not only to treat race and health equity as a wicked problem that benefits from interdisciplinary conversations with a strong humanistic core, but also, to strategize ways of communicating that research to a broader public, reaching key agents in communities and institutional settings within the health care industry. 

Learn more about the Black Bodies, Black Health Project here.

The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) aims to revive and transform Descriptive Bibliography—the systematic description of print materials as physical objects—for African American and Black Diaspora literary studies. The goal is to create a digital database whose capacities can reveal the dynamic social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture in the U.S. and beyond.

McGill and Goldsby believe that the digital environment is ideally suited for bibliographic information: unlike codex bibliographies, a digital bibliographic database can be queryable, expandable, revisable, and re-organizable (no longer ordered only by the lives of authors); it can include images of covers, illustrations, and vital bibliographic details; it can also be crowd-sourced and publicly accessible. By tapping the explanatory potential of digital technologies (specifically, the revolutionary metadata approach called “Linked Data”), the goal of this project is to build an electronic database whose networking capacities can reveal the social formations and aesthetic practices that are specific to Black print culture, in the U.S. and across the Black Diaspora. 

Dr. Tajah Ebram Appointed as First Black Studies Librarian and Lead for the Black Bibliography Project

The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, Rutgers University Libraries and the Black Bibliography Project  are delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Tajah Ebram as the first Black Studies Librarian at Rutgers University.  In addition to supporting faculty and students working in Black studies, Dr. Ebram will serve as the Rutgers lead for the Black Bibliography Project, which seeks to revitalize the practice of bibliography for African American literary and cultural studies. She will be based in Alexander Library, collaborating across the campus and with BBP colleagues at Yale University.

Read more about Dr. Ebram's appointment here.

2024 Update

The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) has had a very successful 2023-2024 year:  refining data models, choosing lists of works on which to focus, dramatically increasing the store of data about Black Print Culture, and recruiting a new cohort of Graduate Fellows. 

As of June 2024, the project has added seven Graduate Fellows from Rutgers – drawn from the departments of English, History, Spanish and Portuguese, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  The new Rutgers fellows have just joined the new Yale fellows for an intensive two-week training session held at Yale’s Beinecke Library, where they learned about the history of Black Print Culture, familiarized themselves with the BBP data model for books, pamphlets, and broadsides, and joined ongoing discussions about developing new ways to record information about anthologies and periodicals.  Highlights of the training session included guest lectures by scholars Derrek Spires (University of Delaware), Caroline Goeser (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Joy James (Williams College), Howard Rambsy II (Southern Illiniois), and Richard Yarborough (UCLA), as well as artist and Faculty Fellow Sam Vernon (Pratt Institute), book dealer Rebecca Romney (Type Punch Matrix), and Executive Director of the Bibliographical Society of America Erin McGuirl.  Rutgers Team Lead Tajah Ebram (Alexander Library) and the Graduate Fellows look forward to an exciting summer of working with rare materials from our target lists on Black Self-Publishing, Black Women’s Writing before 1910, mid 20^th-century Independent Presses, such as Jihad Press, Kitchen Table Press, and Broadside Press, and Black Prison Writing.

Field notes from the Archive

Access the series of blog posts from graduate fellows on their archival work with The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) and 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 here.

Learn more about the The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) here.