Role: Principal Investigator

Marika Cifor, PhD, is Associate Professor at the UW iSchool, where she is also adjunct faculty in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. An expert in archives and digital studies, she is the author of Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and over 20 articles in archival studies,…

Gracen Brilmyer, PhD, (they/them) is a disabled researcher working at the intersection of feminist disability studies and archival studies. Their work investigates the erasure of disabled people in archives primarily within the history of natural history museums and colonial histories as well as how disabled people experience themselves in archival material. They are an Assistant…

Tolu Balogun, PhD, has extensive experience in records and archives management, having previously worked with several international organizations including at the United Nations. Tolu holds doctoral and master’s degrees in records and archives management from the University of Zululand, South Africa and the University of Ghana. As BMRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Community Archives, Tolu supports…

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…