People

People Details

  • Nicole Burrowes
  • Nicole Burrowes
  • Assistant Professor of History
  • Degree: CUNY Graduate Center
  • Rutgers : At Rutgers since 2020
  • Specialty: African Diaspora; Modern Caribbean and African American History
  • Office: 002E Van Dyck Hall

 

Biography

Assistant Professor, Department of History
Residential Faculty Fellow, Honors College
Faculty Affiliate, Africana Studies
Assistant Director, Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Latin American Studies

My scholarship reflects and informs emerging directions in African Diaspora Studies, with a focus on 20th century Caribbean and African-American history. My interests include social movements, racial capitalism, Black Internationalism, and the politics of solidarity.

My current book project, Seeds of Solidarity: African-Indian Relations and the 1935 Labor Rebellions in British Guiana, explores the historical possibility of a movement forged by those at the edges of empire in the midst of economic, political, and environmental crises, and is under contract with Cambridge University Press. My intervention is three-pronged: to center the 1930s and working people in the development of modern politics in the Caribbean; to expand the framework of “overlapping diasporas;” and, by examining the seeds of solidarity, to counter generations of hegemonic narratives that focus exclusively on racial discord.

I am also part of the international interdisciplinary team working on the project: "Inter-Minority Coalition or Conflict? Identity Formation and Relations Between Asian and Black Communities in the UK and U.S.," funded by the British Academies.

In 2015, I earned my Ph.D. in Latin American History and African Diaspora Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. Among my primary commitments in the academy are: fostering global consciousness among students; developing a pipeline of students of color to enter academia; and compelling higher education to reflect the needs and aspirations of students and communities. For ten years, I recruited underrepresented undergraduates to pursue graduate studies through my work as a mentor and subsequent Assistant Director of the Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Summer Institute at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Beyond academia, I have extensive experience in community organizing, including most recently with Enlarging Our Freedom: Abolition and Birthing Justice, a national project; and Communities of Color United for Racial Justice in Austin, Texas. Examples of past work include co-founding Sista II Sista/Hermana a Hermana Freedom School for Young Women of Color in Brooklyn, NY and the Youth Education Alliance in Washington, DC.

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and my family is from Guyana, South America. I currently live in New Brunswick, NJ.

Publications

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES

  • Burrowes, Nicole. “Building the World We Want to See: Sista II Sista and the Struggle Against State and Interpersonal Violence.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 20, no. 4 (October-December 2018): 375-398.
  • Burrowes, Nicole, Laura Helton, La TaSha Levy, and Deborah McDowell. “Freedom Summer and its Legacies in the Classroom.” The Southern Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2014): 155-172.

EDITED PROJECTS

BOOK CHAPTERS

  • Burrowes, Nicole. “Walter Rodney, World Systems Analysis and Racial Capitalism.” In Hierarchies at Work: Race, World Systems, and Legal Distributional Analysis, edited by Karen Engle and Neville Hoad. New York: Columbia University Press, 2025.
  • Lee, Tamara and Nicole Burrowes. “Critical Lenses in the Global South: Two Scholars in Conversation.” In A Racial Reckoning in Industrial Relations: Storytelling as Revolution from Within, edited by Tamara L. Lee, SheriDavis-Faulkner, Naomi R. Williams and Maite Tapia, 131-147.Ithaca:  Labor and Employment Relations Association, Cornell University Press, 2022.
  • Burrowes, Nicole, and La TaSha Levy. “Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Teaching the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Project.” In Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Hasan Jeffries, 144-158. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.

BOOK REVIEWS

  • Burrowes, Nicole. Review of White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery by Thomas Harding. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 98, no. 1-2 (12 April 2024): 141-142. https://www.sciencedirect.com/org/science/article/pii/S1382237324000230
  • Burrowes, Nicole. Review of Post-Colonial Trajectories in the Caribbean: The Three Guianas, edited by R. Hoefte, M.L. Bishop, and P. Clegg. Small States and Territories Journal 1, no.1 (May 2018): 135-6.
  • Burrowes, Nicole. “Responding to King Sugar's Painful Rule: Clive Thomas and the Vision for an Economically Independent Caribbean.” Review of Plantations, Peasants and State, by Clive Y. Thomas. C.L.R. James Journal 22, no. ½ (Fall 2016): 287-296.

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP

Selected Awards and Fellowships

  • Early Career Faculty Fellow, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, 2024-2025
  • Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, September 2021 – August 2024
  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, September 2020 – August 2021
  • Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty, Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, June – December 2020
  • Mellon Post-Custodial Archives Engagement Mini-Grant, The University of Texas at Austin, March 2019
  • George A. Smathers Libraries Special and Area Studies Collections Travel Grant, University of Florida, July 2018
  • Summer Research Fellowship, John L. Warfield Center, The University of Texas at Austin, June 2018
  • Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of History, Brown University, July 2015 – June 2017
  • Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, University of Virginia, August 2013 – July 2015
  • Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, African and African Diaspora Studies Department, The University of Texas at Austin, September 2011 – May 2012
  • Doctoral Student Research Grant, CUNY Graduate Center, January 2011
  • Travel Award, CUNY Office of Educational Opportunity & Diversity, June 2008
  • Project Involve Awardee – Documentary Section, Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), May 2004
  • Social Justice Fellow, Open Society Foundations, September 2002
  • Named by the New York Daily News: “21 New Yorkers to Watch in the 21st Century,” January 2000