Rutgers University Researchers and Scholars in Africana Studies: A Spotlight

Hyacinth Miller is a political scientist whose interdisciplinary research centers on Black women in politics, Caribbean and African political development, and Black immigrant political incorporation. Miller's interests include Black women in elected office, domestically and internationally, with an emphasis on candidate emergence and campaign strategy. Her current research project, tentatively titled The Garden State's Black Politics, examines Black women in elected office in New Jersey. A second, nascent research project concerns 21st-century calls for reparations and repair and the political and legal responses to these calls.

Omaris Zamora is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar and spoken-word poet. Her research interests include: theorizing AfroLatinidad in the context of race, gender, sexuality through Afro-diasporic approaches.

Her current book project tentatively titled, Cigüapa Unbound: AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation, examines transnational Black Dominican narratives in the work of Firelei Baez, Elizabeth Acevedo, Nelly Rosario, Ana Lara, Loida Maritza Pérez, Josefina Baez, Cardi B, and La Bella Chanel. Zamora pays close attention to how they embody their blackness, produce knowledge, and shift the geographies of black feminism in ways that recognize the legacies of Chicana/Latina and Black American feminist theory in the United States, but tends to the specific experiences of AfroLatina women and their multiple genealogies.

Keith Michael Green is a proud alumnus of Camden High, and his research and teaching interests center people of African descent in speculative fiction, captivity narratives, disability studies, and multilingualism. His first book, Bound to Respect: Antebellum Narratives of Black Imprisonment, Servitude, and Bondage: 1816-1861 (Alabama, 2015), explored neglected forms of captivity blacks experienced and recounted in the nineteenth century. He also co-edited a collection of essays on bondage and subjection in the contemporary moment, entitled Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages (Routledge, 2019). His current projects explore the meanings of Cuba for blacks in the United States, multilingual African American literary production, as well as the married and religious life of two enslaved persons in colonial New England, Hannah Hovey and Briton Hammon. 

Rutgers University Researchers and Scholars in Criminal Justice

Frank Edwards studies fatal police violence and how the politics of Black exploitation and Native elimination jointly structure the operation of U.S. social policy systems.  A sociologist broadly interested in social control, the welfare state, race, and applied statistics, his work explores the causes and consequences of the social distribution of state violence through two projects.

The first draws attention to child protection systems as key sites of family disruption. This work shows that American child protection systems are tightly intertwined with carceral and welfare policy systems, and that race and colonization play a central role in explaining the spatial and social distribution of family separation.

The second provides detailed analyses of the prevalence of police-involved killings in the US. This project uses novel data and Bayesian methods to provide estimates of mortality risk by race, sex, and place. It also evaluates how institutions and politics affect the prevalence of police violence.

Kayla Preito-Hodge is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Camden. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her dissertation, “Too Black for the Blue’s” was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Dr. Preito-Hodge’s research and teaching explore the intersections of race, policing, organizations, and the larger criminal justice system. Her work has been featured in journals such as Social Currents, Socius, and Psychology of Violence. Additionally, her work has been supported by various internal and external funders. She is currently working on a book manuscript that critically examines Black police officers in the era of the Movement for Black Lives. Dr. Preito-Hodge also holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Boston College. She is an avid supporter of criminal justice and juvenile justice reform.

Benjamin Justice is Distinguished Professor of Education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education and an associate member of the History Department at Rutgers—New Brunswick. He holds a courtesy appointment as Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. He also serves as series editor of New Directions in History of Education, at Rutgers University Press. Dr. Justice is past president of the History of Education Society, and a former member of the Standing Committee on American History for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Currently, Dr. Justice examines the ways in which the US criminal justice system educates. This work builds innovative connections between legitimacy theory and curriculum theory, positing that criminal justice is, itself, a form of civic education. Dr. Justice spent the 2023-24 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, writing a book on how experiences with police, courts, and pre-trial detention offer formal and hidden curricula that shape civic identity.