Sumayya Ahmed, PhD, joined the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) and the University of Chicago Library as Executive Director of the BMRC in January, 2024. Prior to joining the BMRC, Ahmed worked as an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University in Boston, where she taught in the Archives Management concentration. The great-granddaughter of Black Southerners who migrated to Chicago in the 1930s, the archives of the African diaspora in Chicago has personal significance.
Ahmed earned her PhD in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in African American Studies and Sociology from Wesleyan University. She is the co-editor of the Routledge Studies in Archives Series and has published extensively on the social life of archives in North Africa and the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, and on race and equity within the library, archives, and museum sector.