The “History Workshop” (506:299) course forms a core part of Rutgers undergraduate History majors’ training in historical methods and the historian’s craft. Students learn the basics of what constitutes a historical archive, how to locate and analyze primary sources, and how to synthesize these sources alongside secondary literature. While the themes of each History Workshop class vary according to the professor’s research interests, all sections provide students with a solid foundation in historical research methods that they build on in future seminars and/or thesis research.
In the fall semester of 2025, Dr. Nicole Burrowes launched an experimental History Workshop course: “Afro-Asian Relations in New Jersey.” Dr. Burrowes, an Assistant Professor of History, designed the course at the nexus of her own research interests and recent developments in local education and politics. Her new book, Seeds of Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in July 2026), examines a series of labor uprisings led by African- and Indian-Guianese youth, women, and men who worked on sugar plantations in the midst of manifold economic, political, and environmental crises. Despite efforts to turn these communities against each other, Dr. Burrowes chronicles how laborers of African and Indian descent engaged in collective action while also forging distinct racial identities. She is also part of an international research project exploring identity formation and community development between Black and Asian communities across the United States and the United Kingdom.
Dr. Nicole Burrowes, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
Dr. Burrowes’ new course also grows out of recent shifts in the state’s social studies curriculum. Four years ago, New Jersey became the second state in the country to require Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history as part of its public school curriculum. NJ S40121, signed into law by former Governor Phil Murphy in January 2022, evolved out of the grassroots activism of a coalition of parents, students, and educators who championed greater awareness of AAPI history in the wake of anti-Asian violence that rose during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new course developed by Dr. Burrowes demonstrates how greater attention to AAPI history crucially rethinks dominant narratives and chronologies of other kinds of history. “You can’t just write African American history as a Black-and-white project anymore,” Dr. Burrowes says. Scholars of the past decade have published robust studies that examine the connections between Indigenous, Latinx, and Black communities in the United States and beyond. The new course developed by Dr. Burrowes contributes to this effort by examining multiracial histories of Afro-Asian communities in a local context.
Throughout the semester, students learned how to analyze primary sources, engage with historiography, and conduct archival research through the lens of Afro-Asian relations. Staff members from the Rutgers Oral History Archives (ROHA) led a workshop for students on conducting and utilizing oral history interviews in historical research. Students learned about the Bandung Conference in 1955, during which newly independent African and Asian nations convened in Indonesia to organize for greater political and economic decolonization. The class also explored the shared struggles and alliances between Black and Asian students during the 1960s that made possible the creation of Ethnic Studies departments across the country. Students traced these historical threads to contemporary issues such as debates over affirmative action and the model minority myth, a harmful stereotype that portrays Asian Americans as more successful than other racial minorities. As much as the class unearthed a rich history of Afro-Asian solidarity, it also shone a light on the ways that Black and Asian Americans are often pitted against one another in ways that only fuel systemic racism.
For their final assignment for the course, students conducted their own research projects on historical issues in Black and Asian communities in New Jersey. Many students utilized oral histories in their research, either analyzing pre-existing interviews housed at ROHA or conducting their own interviews with family and community members. One student analyzed how intersectionality and a commitment to cultural heritage informed the creation and development of Crossroads Theatre Company in New Brunswick. Drawing on an oral history interview with co-founder Ricardo Khan housed in ROHA’s repository, the student’s project examined how Khan and others relied on relationships within New Brunswick’s Black community to bring their theatrical productions to the stage. In a presentation to the larger class, the student reflected on the importance of adaptability and reflexivity when working with oral histories, recalling how they “listened to him rather than sticking to what I had prepared.” Another student interviewed their cousin, a biracial person with Haitian and Filipino heritage living in a predominantly Asian community to understand the role that age plays in the formation of Afro-Asian racial identity and learned new family stories and traditions.
Other students approached well-studied topics with fresh insights gleaned from Dr. Burrowes’ lectures about the possibilities and problems of multiracial solidarity. One student returned to the fraught history of Seabrook Farms in South Jersey, one of the largest agribusinesses in the U.S. during the mid-20th century which relied on the captive labor of thousands of interned Japanese immigrants and their children during the 1940s (for more on the history of Seabrook Farms, check out the amazing digital exhibit created by Associate Professor of History Andy Urban and his students). Faced with an archive filled with state propaganda, the student reflected on how historians must creatively mine primary sources for the perspectives and experiences of those whose stories they seek to tell. Their presentation also meditated on what reparations might look like for interned Japanese laborers and the Black workers who toiled alongside them. Another student conducted research on how Asian and Black American soldiers encountered one another during Cold War, considering the extent to which geographic proximity fostered solidarity under a shared condition of vulnerability. Regardless of whether students’ projects developed from individual passions, familial traditions, or broader academic interests, each demonstrated how the tools of historical inquiry can expand our understanding of Asian American, African American, and New Jersey histories and their many intersections.
The History Workshop course on “Afro-Asian Relations in New Jersey” not only reflects the rigorous training of undergraduate scholars, but also the creative and liberatory pedagogy of Rutgers History faculty members. For Dr. Burrowes, the impetus to develop this course reflects her commitment to engaging local communities in her scholarship and teaching. That many of the students enrolled in the class grew up in diverse neighborhoods both within and beyond New Jersey speaks to the power of teaching historical methods through themes and issues that reflect students’ lived experiences. If there is a singular lesson to be taken from Dr. Burrowes’ experimental and engaging course, it is the power of history to offer a model for shared struggle that does not collapse the meaningful differences that shape our identities, traditions, and customs.