Raised in Greenwich Village in New York City, Gabby Hill knows firsthand the power of history to shape and interpret the present. Hill, a junior History major at Rutgers, grew up across the street from the Stonewall Inn, whose history as the birthplace of the LGBTQIA+ rights movement reverberates across the neighborhood. Hill recalls how family members and teachers often encouraged her to read widely and apply what she learned to issues outside of the classroom. “That’s just the kind of community I grew up in,” she explains.
Gabby Hill, a junior History major at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Many undergraduate History majors are engaged in Public History, a program within the Department of History that trains students to think critically about the circulation of historical knowledge and gain hands-on experiences in various career paths. Since arriving at Rutgers, Hill has deepened her commitment to put history to work through a variety of courses and extracurricular activities. Hill, who is also pursuing a minor in Education, works as an assistant archivist to the Thomas Edison Papers Project, a Rutgers initiative that seeks to make accessible the life and legacy of the prolific inventor through digital archiving and book publications. During the summer of 2026, she will continue her work in archiving and community engagement at the Cornelius Low House in Piscataway, New Jersey.
Most recently, Hill continued her commitment to archiving and public history in Dr. Kris Scorsone’s “New Jersey History” course during the Fall 2025 semester. For their final project, students were tasked with creating a short video that analyzes an aspect of New Jersey history and how it connects to the contemporary moment. Hill produced a powerful documentary chronicling Rutgers students’ anti-apartheid activism in the 1970s and 80s. The documentary draws on student protest flyers, pamphlets, meeting minutes, photographs, and news reports that Hill collected while doing research in the Rutgers Grass Roots - Progressive Activist Files at Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives. During the late 1970s, students, faculty, staff, and alumni formed the Coalition in Solidarity with Southern African Liberation (CISSAL) to raise awareness about Rutgers’ ties to South African apartheid. For the next several years, students escalated their protest to lead sit-ins, hunger strikes, vigils, and mass demonstrations, ultimately pressuring the University to divest $6.4 million from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa in 1985. Hill’s documentary traces how the campaign against apartheid built upon the organizing of students of color nearly a decade earlier. Beginning in the 1960s, Black and Puerto Rican students across Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick launched demonstrations that pushed for equity in student recruitment, the hiring and retention of Black faculty, the creation of a Black Studies program, and greater accountability to the communities surrounding the University. “Together,” Hill concludes, “these moments show that student protest at Rutgers is not just an exception, it’s tradition.”
Flyer announcing a joint meeting of the Revolutionary Student Brigade and the Coalition in Solidarity with Southern African Liberation (CISSAL). Coalition in Solidarity with Southern African Liberation (CISSAL), “75 Students Jam Hearing; R.U. Divest Now!,” Scarlet and Black Digital Archive, Rutgers University, https://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu/archive/items/show/883.
Hill’s research also examines how recent campus protest movements reflect this tradition of student activism at Rutgers, drawing connections between the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s and students’ present-day calls for Rutgers to divest from companies tied to Israel and end partnerships with Tel Aviv University. “I was specifically drawn to the anti-apartheid movement,” she explains, “because, number one, it was about divestment. If you look at the fliers that [student organizers in the 1980s] made… you just need to switch a few words, and you’ve got the same flyer we’re making today.” Hill’s belief that the history of anti-apartheid activism could instill hope in her fellow student organizers drove her to present her research in documentary form.
Left: A student holds up a protest sign at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in April 2024. Photo credit to Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor.
Right: A student holds up a protest sign at the anti-apartheid rally at the Douglass Student Center in December 1977. “Photograph: Protester with Divest Now sign at a campus anti-apartheid rally,” Scarlet and Black Digital Archive, Rutgers University, https://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu/archive/items/show/911.
Hill’s historical contextualization of current student activism also grew out of the relationships she built with Rutgers alumni while working on her final project for Dr. Scorsone’s course. According to Dr. Scorsone, “Gabby went above and beyond the requirements for the project, conducting extensive additional research and oral histories with alumni who participated in anti-apartheid and other movements at Rutgers.” The decision to interview people who participated in this history felt important to Hill. “I think their voices need to be heard,” she explained, “I knew they had stories to tell, that they had important things to tell us.” She began by interviewing Sue Kozel and Chris Berzinski, both of whom were student organizers for the anti-apartheid movement and other activist campaigns while attending Rutgers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The interview was successful and afterward, Hill sought guidance and resources from the Rutgers Oral History Archives to continue her work interviewing alumni who participated in the movement.
Although she submitted the documentary for her final project last semester, Hill’s work is not finished. She plans to build upon her research over the next year in an honors thesis project that seeks to improve institutional archiving practices and make archival research more accessible to undergraduate students. Hill recalls her first time visiting Rutgers Special Collections while conducting research for the documentary. Slightly intimidated, she was handed a giant box of archival materials by a librarian and felt unsure of what to do next. “Some undergraduates come to the archives not knowing what to do… and I want to create something to help them,” she says. Collaborating with fellow students, Rutgers History faculty, and archivists at Rutgers Special Collections, Hill aims to produce a low-resource guide that archivists and scholars can use to interpret and curate archival material, making it more accessible to undergraduate researchers. Her overall goal is to create “something that helps [undergraduates] employ their techniques, their curiosity, their research skills.” Armed with a solid foundation in historical research methods and a deep commitment to justice, Hill is poised to produce impactful public scholarship that pushes the University to better understand its past while empowering students to harness history as an organizing tool.