Institute for Global Racial Justice Sets Vision through its Foundational Leaders

January 26, 2021

Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to share early updates on The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  As one of the most far-reaching intellectual and institutional projects Rutgers has undertaken, the Institute amplifies the scholarship in our humanistic fields as they commit to the work of social justice, focusing especially on anti-racism and social inequality.  The Institute will establish a vibrant intellectual space for research, the arts, and public engagement across our campuses in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick, with RBHS contributions as well, and it will facilitate spaces for mutual conversation, shared undertaking, and knowledge production between the university and its surrounding communities.

Much progress has already been made in establishing the cross-institutional leadership for the institute, under the stewardship of Founding Executive Director Michelle Stephens. A psychoanalyst and scholar in Caribbean and African Diasporic Studies, Dr. Stephens brings a vision for the Institute in which humanistic and imaginative modes of inquiry will evaluate the past, address the embedded issues of the present, and help determine how we can create a more racially just future. Dr. Stephens will be joined by a stellar leadership team of Campus Directors.

Leading the institute as Director from Rutgers-Newark will be Elise Boddie. A Henry Rutgers Professor of Law and a Judge Robert L. Carter Scholar, Professor Boddie is also a leading national commentator on the intersection of race and civil and constitutional rights, and the founder and director of The Inclusion Project, which seeks to advance racial equity through law and policy, research, community engagement, and media. Professor Boddie will focus her directorship on exploring dynamic solutions to systemic racism that can be activated through law and policy and on developing equitable integration for public education, in partnership with researchers, communities, and students. She will help to attract publicly-engaged scholars across a variety of disciplines and to providing mentorship opportunities for junior and mid-career scholars whose work bears on themes of race and justice.

Anchoring the Institute from Rutgers-New Brunswick as its Director will be Erica Armstrong Dunbar, the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History. Dr. Dunbar envisions the Institute’s mission as enabling Rutgers faculty to become thought leaders on issues that are central to global progress. She will convene postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and faculty to foster a community that engages with the study of anti-Black thought, the history of settler colonialism, and the growth and development of carceral spaces. A recipient of the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Dr. Dunbar has authored two books of national acclaim that have brought the often-invisible histories of black women to public awareness, as well as a recent biography of Harriet Tubman, one of the most remarkable social activists of the 19th century.

Co-directing the institute from Rutgers-Camden will be Gregory Pardlo and Patrick Rosal of the Creative Writing program in the Department of English.  Professor Pardlo is a writer and author whose collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Professor Pardlo focuses on the impact of racial and cultural histories on the craft of writing itself. His work challenges writers to interrogate the ways in which their creative visions might contribute to a vision of the world that devalues the individual. He aims to create a supportive and collaborative space at the Institute where such questions can be pursued ethically for both their practical and imaginative implications.  Professor Rosal is a writer, interdisciplinary artist, and author of four books. Winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize, he has led writing workshops for youth, incarcerated populations, and writers of color, and will seek to imbue the Institute with the opportunity to improvise through the lens of racial justice. Born and raised in New Jersey after his parents immigrated from the Philippines, Professor Rosal is attentive to the interplay of the local and the global as it pertains to issues of racial justice, with a special awareness of the richness of New Jersey itself as a shaping context for our thinking. 

This exceptional constellation of scholars communicates the Institute’s fundamental orientation and makes evident the momentum it has already begun to gather. The directors, who can be reached directly or at the institute address, will be conducting outreach on each campus to discuss the Institute’s research programs and activities for its full launch in summer and fall of 2021. The first forthcoming announcement will be the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice  Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, followed by the launch of a Junior and Senior Faculty Fellows Program in collaboration with the schools and academic leads on each campus. These recruitments will further strengthen the important scholarship on race and social justice led by our faculty at Rutgers and accelerate the broader diversification of our university, a transformational project that President Holloway, I, and our colleagues are keen to undertake.

Sincerely,

Prabhas V. Moghe, Ph.D.
Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Distinguished Professor