Post-Doctoral Fellowship - The New Jersey Immigrant Laborers' Monument Project Department of American Studies

The New Jersey Immigrant Laborers' Monument Project, and the American Studies department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, seek a postdoctoral fellow for a calendar-year appointment that begins on August 1, 2025, and ends on July 31, 2026. (The fellow is only required to be in-person at Rutgers during the academic year, 9/2/25 to 5/13/26.) This fellowship is funded by the Mellon Foundation Monuments Project.

The New Jersey Immigrant Laborers' Monument Project is organizing a series of public events, to take place in the fall and winter of 2025/2026, in which community stakeholders will collaborate with public artists to create monument installations and other programming exploring immigrants and migrants' contributions to the state as laborers. Examining immigrants who came to New Jersey from abroad, as well as groups who moved internally within the United States, this project grapples with the xenophobia, hostility, and exclusions that working-class migrants have historically encountered, despite providing essential labor. Rarely is the public given the opportunity to engage with art and history that commemorate the difficult, unglamorous, but crucial work that migrants supply. This project provides a national model for how public space can be critically reinterpreted through monuments that take the form of installations, performances, and tours that highlight the histories of im/migrants who toiled as servants, industrial workers, and agricultural laborers. This project will use public art and history to facilitate conversations about relationships between work, migration, race, and citizenship today.

This fellowship carries a 1/1 teaching load. The fellow will teach one interdisciplinary undergraduate course, based out of the American Studies department at Rutgers, New Brunswick, and one interdisciplinary undergraduate course, based out of the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers, Newark. (Newark and New Brunswick are about 30 minutes apart from each other, by NJ Transit, which runs frequently. Both campuses can also be reached from New York City.) These courses, to be developed in partnership with the project team, can focus on any number of themes related to the subjects of migration and labor, so long as they highlight community engagement and the creation of content and programming that connects the conversations, dialogues, and oral histories that will be occurring at the project's public events.

The fellow will also be expected to help organize, participate in, and lead some of the public events, programs, and discussions connected to this project. A certain amount of travel around the state of New Jersey will be expected, and attendance at occasional evening events, but a car or driver's license is not required.

The fellow hired for this project will gain firsthand experience collaborating with artists and community stakeholders on a groundbreaking project that seeks to make labor and migration histories accessible to broad audiences. The expectation is that the fellow will deprioritize their own research for a year, in exchange for the chance to help lead a cutting-edge public humanities project.

Questions? Please email Andy Urban, aturban@rutgers.edu, Associate Professor, American Studies & History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and Project Director.

Applicants must have a Ph.D., or will have fulfilled all requirements for their Ph.D., by no later than August 1, 2025, when the appointment begins.

As an interdisciplinary project, applicants from a wide range of departments and programs in the arts, humanities, and related fields in the social sciences are invited to apply, so long as their teaching, scholarly, and practitioner interests align with the project themes of migration, labor, and public memory. Applicants should be knowledgeable of the theories, methodologies, and pedagogical practices that shape community-engaged, collaborative knowledge production, and have experience working with students, partners, and stakeholders to bring public art, history, or humanities programming to fruition.

The American Studies Department, in Rutgers-New Brunswick, promotes socially engaged and historically grounded research. Students are encouraged to conduct research projects and field studies that explore the rich cultural history, ethnic and class diversity, and community networks of New Jersey and beyond. Exploration of the local and regional environment is grounded in transnational approaches to the field of American Studies, wherein students are encouraged to think beyond geopolitical and historical boundaries and to consider the local within regional, national, and global networks and processes.

The Department of Arts, Culture and Media combines an interdisciplinary community-oriented core curriculum taken by all majors in the department with discipline-based majors. In addition to the integrated core, the department offers programs of study in Art, Design and Art History, Journalism, Video Production, Music, and Theatre Arts. With a faculty that includes nationally and internationally recognized scholars and artists, the Department of Arts, Culture and Media offers innovative courses with an emphasis on integration in the arts and the campus's urban mission of community engagement. In addition to the opportunity to combine academic study with hands-on class experience, students benefit enormously from the Department's internship programs. These programs, which provide entry level professional contacts, draw upon the richness of Newark's cultural institutions such as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Newark Museum, Prudential, The Star Ledger, and New Jersey Television Network as well as the opportunities offered by the rest of Northern New Jersey and especially New York

City. Finally, the Department of Arts, Culture, Media is an integral participant in Express Newark - a university-community Collaboratory.

The New Jersey Immigrant Laborers' Monument Project is developing monument installations exploring immigrants and migrants' contributions to the state as laborers. Examining immigrants who have come to New Jersey from abroad, as well as Southern Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other populations who have moved internally within the United States, this project grapples with the hostility and exclusions that groups migrating for work have historically encountered. Critics stigmatize immigrants as economic burdens undeserving of protections or benefits. In racial and cultural terms, immigrants are demonized as criminals, unassimilable threats to "American" values, and worse. Rarely is the public given the chance to confront art and history commemorating the unglamorous but essential labor that migrants perform. This project proposes monument installations and place-based public dialogues, engagements, performances, and programs that celebrate immigrant laborers, past and present, while also interpreting their complicated stories. Developed by artists working in close partnership with community stakeholders over multiple stages, monument installations will explore what it has meant to migrate and work, while also offering a model for how monumental expressions can actively and democratically involve the public in constructing new and more inclusive commemorative landscapes. This process, as well as what the project learns about labor and migration in New Jersey through the interviews and oral histories conducted at public events, will be exhibited, and archived, on the project website.

Please provide through the portal:

* A cover letter - please use this space to discuss your relevant experience, the public humanities or arts courses that you might teach at Rutgers, and what programming you imagine potentially contributing to the project;

* A CV;

* Samples or a portfolio of public art and/or humanities projects, pedagogy, programming, or scholarship (no greater than 10 pdf pages in total);

* A list of three references, to be contacted if the candidate is selected for an interview.

American Studies Department
12 Chemistry Drive, Room 201
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901